


The Way Our Horizons Meet

by plinys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Buddy the Dog, Cheating, Divorce, F/F, Fake Marriage, Fluff and Angst, Green Card Marriage, Homophobic Language, M/M, No SHIELD, Questioning, Slow Build, i'm terrible with tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-03 12:15:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 50,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1744265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four years ago Skye married Jemma in order to keep her from being deported, now when the day has come to end things she can't help herself from wondering how they got here and how she can get her to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> So originally I wrote a little drabble of this over on tumblr, and there was such an outpouring of people asking for more that I decided to actually turn it into a full length story! So uh.. enjoy?

**June 3rd, 2014**

She hadn’t noticed that anything was different about this particular day at first.

It had started off like any other, it had felt just like any other day - and in the grand scheme of things, looking back upon this day, Skye would often wonder about the signs she had missed.

Certainly there had been them, if she had only managed to pay proper attention.

However, she had not.

Thus leading the surprise of her life, when at the usual time that they would be sitting down to eat their respective breakfast foods and drink their morning cups of tea, she was greeted with a manila folder rather than her usual mug.

“What’s this,” she asks, setting her spoon down in the sugar coated mess she likes to pretend is cereal and reaching out for the folder.

Jemma’s hand stops hers, “it might be best to wait until I leave for work to look over it.”

There’s something in her tone and the horrible almost guilty look on the other woman’s face that causes everything within Skye to go cold at once. She feels like she’s going to be sick, though she can’t put her feeling on exactly why.

“Please tell me you’re not dying,”  Skye says, slightly desperate as her mind whirls through all the terrible possibilities.

At that Jemma at least seems to realize what Skye is thinking and puts on her comforting face.

It’s the same face Jemma wore when she told Skye their fish had died.

It’s the same face she had on while reading the news before announcing that their favorite show had been canceled.

And it’s the same face she wore when Fitz and Ward-

“No,” Skye says too loud and too suddenly, because somehow she’s put the pieces together all at once, “Jemma, it’s not, no, right?”

“It’s June 3rd,” Jemma says, as if that is the answer to everything, and it a way it was.

June 3rd was confirmation to all of Skye’s worst fears.

This time when she tried to pull the envelope away Jemma let her take it.  

She knows even before she open it what she’s going to see inside, but holding the pages in her hands don’t make anything better, it really just makes things worse.

“I already talked to my lawyers and they sorted everything out,” Jemma explains, “in a few weeks we’ll be free from this.” She must look up then to see Skye’s face for she let’s out a little sigh and says, “if this was a bad time you should have said something.”  

“When was I supposed to say something,” Skye asks angrily, unable to focus on much anything other than the divorce papers sitting on their dining room table.

“Before,” she offers with a shrug.

She says before, as if it were only that simple.

As if one day Skye could have pulled Jemma aside in the middle of a grocery store and said _I love you and I don’t want to lose you,_ and all of this could have been avoided.

“Look Skye, there’s nothing to say,” Jemma replies, “and there’s nothing to even be upset about. We had a deal, four years, we did that - and I thank you a million times for putting up with me for so long, but we’re good now. A few months from now we’ll be signing these pages in front of our lawyers and you’ll be free to do whatever it is you want.”

“Jemma, I-” she starts only to stop herself, because how does she explain this, how does she explain what she is feeling.

How does she admit that she fell in love with her years ago, over shared breakfast and late nights watching their favorite shows?

How does she explain that the little dance they do outside of the bathroom when swapping places is one of her favorite morning rituals, even if Jemma looks like a dork with bed hair?

How does she even begin to put into words the way her heart leaps when somebody else refers her Jemma as her wife?

How does she say that the only she wants in the whole world is standing right in front of her?

_“What if I don’t want to get a divorce?”_


	2. Year 0

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so this chapter doesn't have much Simmons in it, but it's the build up to the main arc of the story and the story setting chapter.

 

**December 16th, 2009**

If Skye wanted to account for whose fault it was for completely ruining her life, she would probably blame it on the gay couple that got her fired from working at the pet shelter back during the winter of 2009.

She would like to think that she had known they were trouble the second they walked in, but honestly when they walked into the shelter she had been too busy on her laptop to do more than look up at them for a quick moment, coo at the fact that they were holding hands, before turning back to her program.

Skye figures they’ll be like every other couple that she’s seen in and out of the animal shelter, they’ll wander about for a bit, look at the animals and then walk out never to be seen again.

So when the bell at her desk rings sooner than she expected Skye’s slightly surprised to see the couple staring at her with eager expressions on one of their faces.

They’re cute together.

There's one that’s the epitome of tall, dark and handsome; though he’s standing as if he’s awkward in his own skin.

While the other probably has his photograph in the dictionary next to the word _twink_ , and beams at her like he’s the happiest person in the entire world.

“We’d like to adopt,” the twinky one says in an accent that is obvious foreign.

It’s either Irish or Scottish, she’s never been much able to tell them apart, but it’s one of the two that’s for sure.

“Did you have anything particularly in mind?”

“We already looked at all of the dogs,” tall, dark and handsome replies.  

“There’s no more in the back,” Skye says quickly, because she’s heard this one before, people always seem to think that there’s a back room where they keep the puppies.

“That’s not a problem,” tall, dark, and handsome answers her, “we’ve actually found one we liked.”

“I just not entirely sure how he’s going to fit in our apartment,” twinky says with a pout.

“If you’ve got a small apartment a cat might be better,” Skye repeats the words that had been drilled into her head by her boss. Cats were less likely to be brought back in a few weeks, because cats took up less space and were less energetic.

“No, we can’t get a cat,” tall, dark and handsome insists, “Fitz has a thing about cats.”

“Allergies,” she asks.

“Just traumatizing memories,” his partner, Fitz, says shaking his head, “my lab partner back at Oxford once put a cat’s liver next to my lunch and I have never quite been able to look at cats the same way again.”

“You know it was better when you let me do the talking,” his partner says, before turning to give Skye some sort of apologetic smile, “I promise if you let us adopt a dog, I won’t let him dissect it.”

“Don’t listen to Ward! I’m an engineer not a biochemist! That was all Simmons doing,” Fitz says appalled, “dissecting things is my  _least_ favorite thing in the entire world.”

“That’s uh… good to know?”

“I thought your least favorite thing was when I came back from the grocery store with nothing but protein shakes?”

“Do you see what an awful person I decided to marry,” Fitz looks to her for help, “obviously I need this dog as some form of stable companionship.”

“Well, let’s see if we can’t work something out for you two!”

 

**December 17th, 2009**

“You know how I feel about the queers,” her boss says, as if the word is some sort of disease.

And really off all the things she’d done wrong, this is what she’s getting fired over. Not the goofing off at her station, not the night she forgot to turn off the lights, no she’s getting fired because she let some cute gay couple take home a dog the day before.

Skye groans slumping back in her chair.

She had actually sort of liked this job, it was better than her last one that much was for sure.

“Wasn’t it better than the dog staying here? He was old anyways; nobody else had even looked in his cage in months.”

“No.”

 

**December 17th, 2009**

She had pulled the paperwork when she left the shelter, telling herself it was because she didn’t want her boss finding out where the dog had gone.

Though now standing outside of their apartment building she had to admit herself that her intentions had not been entirely pure, but she had been living out of her van for the last month trying to save up enough to get a halfway decent apartment, and losing her job had never factored into her calculations.

The wind whips the snow about her face and Skye clutches her windbreaker closer to her body in hopes of keeping the snow out.

She presses the buzzer for apparent E4 with all the urgency that she can manage, hoping that somebody is home and that whoever it is won’t turn her away.

Eventually after a moment a voice answers her, scratchy over the buzzer system, “uh, hello?”

“Hey hi, this is Skye! I work - or well worked at the animal shelter, where you adopted Buddy yesterday? I was wondering if-”

Before she even finishes her sentence the lock on the apartments main door clicks and she can’t help herself from smiling at the relative ease in which she got into the apartment. By the time she has taken the four flights up stairs up to the floor where their apartment is, the door to E4 is already open, and a slightly more rumpled version of tall, dark and handsome stands in the doorway holding onto Buddy’s collar.

“You made me lose my job,” Skye says bluntly.

“Do you like tea,” he replies back without even blinking at her statement.

She stares back, awkward and hesitant for a moment before answering, “yes?”

“Fitz just put on the kettle,” and with that he turned back into the apartment, leaving the door open for Skye to follow after them.   

And that’s how she finds herself hours later sitting on an overstuffed red couch telling her life story to two men she had just met the day before over a cup of tea and then a bottle of red wine following that. The winter storms rages on outside of the windows, but for a small moment she finds herself not caring about how she’s going to have to scrape the ice off of her van’s windows and instead finds that she actually likes finally telling everything that’s been going on in her life.

Even if it is to complete strangers, though by the end of it, they don’t really seem like strangers anymore.

“You should stay here,” Ward says, after taking a glance out of the window, “until the storm clears up.”

“We’ve got a guest room,” Fitz offers, noting her hesitance.

“I - I think I might like that.”

 

**December 25th 2009**

“I’m nineteen not twelve,” Skye reminds her housemates, “you do realize that right?”

“Shh, just enjoy the moment,” Fitz says, pressing a wrapped gift into her hands.

She groans when she notices that the package says it’s from _Santa_ and once again feels the need to inform them that she’s a grown woman.

The notion is sort of sweet, in all of those years in foster homes and back at the orphanage she had never once gotten a present from Santa. She flashes Ward a grin when Fitz isn’t looking and opens up the package as carefully as she can in order to preserve the wrapping paper.

“I can’t accept this,” she says when she unveils what was inside, “this has to be worth at least a hundred dollars, my gifts for you guys aren’t even close to being this good.”

“It’s from Santa,” Fitz says all proud of himself, “and Jolly ole St. Nick doesn’t accept returns.”

Her hands shake slightly as she opens the box to pull out the netbook.

“You had been complaining that your computer was lagging, so we,” when Fitz hits him he corrects, “Santa thought that you might want a new one.”

“Holy shit,” Skye says while she continues to marvel at the netbook, “what do you guys do for a living?”

“I make those,” Fitz answers, “that one there is actually a new prototype, it’s not going to be on the market until March. They let me take one home as a thank you for working on the project, but I already have a laptop and didn’t need another. You on the other hand-”

“You guys are the most amazing people in the entire world,” Skye informs them, “I hope you both know that.”

“I know!”

 

**December 31st 2009**

“HAPPY NEW YEARS,” Fitz yells into a phone, startling Skye out of her coding zone and back into the present.  

The clock on the side of her netbook says that its only 7pm.

She can’t hear the other side of the conversation, but from the way his voice continues to escalate throughout the entire conversation she knows it must be somebody he’s close with.

Ward’s in the kitchen, offering her a half-drunk bottle of champagne when she enters that she takes gladly.

“Your husband’s loud,” she informs him, before taking a swig straight from the bottle.

“I’m not even going to touch that one,” he replies, stealing the bottle back from her.

“Oh god - I didn’t mean like that! Please for the love of all things holy do not tell me about your sex life,” Skye groans, slumping onto the counter.

“You asked.”

“Did not! All I said was-”

“On the count of three can you two yell ‘Happy New Years’ for me,” Fitz asks, coming into the kitchen and holding the phone out towards them.

“Uh… okay?”

“Great, let me just,” Fitz says fiddling with the phone.

It takes a bit but the scratchy silence in the room fades as another voice joins them, a female voice that is distinctly British and says, “Oh Fitz, don’t put me on speakerphone!”

“Too late,” he replies gleefully, before gesturing to Skye and Ward, “one, two, and three-”

“Happy New Years,” they say at the same time, Skye and Ward both lacking the obvious enthusiasm that Fitz has when he shouts it into the phone.

“Thank you for humoring him, Fitz is awful isn’t he,” the woman on the phone says and Fitz’s makes little hushing noises at her.

“Are we supposed to know who he’s talking to,” Skye asks, looking to Ward for assistance.

The guy shrugs and says, “I’m betting its Simmons.”

“Simmons?”

“Cat liver!”

“Please tell me you did not tell somebody else the cat liver story,” the woman on the phone, Simmons, says, but they don’t get to hear the rest of what she has to say about that, because Fitz has turned speak phone off and is once again leaving the room talking at a mile a minute.

 

**January 22nd 2010**

“You guys are the cutest couple in the entire world, have I ever told you that,” Skye says, clutching the bottle of vodka close to her chest in case Ward even thinks about stealing it from her, “ _literally_ the cutest.”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” Ward grumbles.

“It is too,” Skye slurs, “you’re the cutest people in the entire world! When I look at you guys, I think - hey maybe I could be that lucky. Probably not, because you’re actually perfect for each other!”

“We’re far from perfect,” he says.

There’s something in his tone that she would have noticed had she been more sober, but she’s had a few too many drinks to care about his inflections, so she slurs, “Liar,” like its all one big joke.

 

**February 6th 2010**

“The news channels are calling it Stormageddon,” Fitz says as if this is the greatest thing in the entire world.

“No,” Ward says with a tone of finality, and from her position on the couch buried in blankets, Skye raises an eyebrow at him in question.

“I haven’t even asked yet,” Fitz whines.

“We’re not going out in it.”

“But Grant, think about! Think about the science!”

Skye shoot a look at Ward and mouths the name _Grant_ with a bit too much glee.

“Don’t you dare,” he hisses back at her.

Hours later when she gets practically buried in a flurry of snowballs, she reckons she sort of deserves it.

 

**February 23rd, 2010**

“Fitz what’s your password,” Skye asks.

She’s sprawled out on the couch; Fitz’s laptop in front of her while the Scotsman talks quickly into the phone in what she believes is Russian. Her questions seems to pull him out of his conversation for a moment, but the moment doesn’t long enough for him to respond to her and soon enough he’s speaking rapid Russian again completely ignoring her presence.

He had insisted that she help him since his computer was acting up, but she couldn’t help him when she was staring at the login screen.

Technically she could hack it, but where was the fun in that.

“Let’s see,” Skye says typing in first Fitz’s birthday and then Ward’s, neither letting her into the computer.

Their anniversary wasn't the answer either.

She types in every version of Ward’s name she can manage - Ward, GWard, GrantWard, GrantDouglasWard - and each time is greeted with the _incorrect passcode_ alert.

“Fitz, password now,” she says, sharper this time, waving rapidly between him and the computer.

He doesn’t answer her, but he does huff slightly, wedge the phone between his ear and shoulder, before sliding in between her and the laptop to type in a passcode too rapidly for her to catch it.

“Your lack of trust in me is astounding,” she grumbles, but Fitz doesn’t pay her any mind.

As the laptop’s screen opens before her eyes, she finds herself staring at the desktop background in mild shock.

She’s not sure why it bothers her at first, but finding that his background was not some sappy picture of him and Ward feels wrong. Especially since the background is definitely Fitz, but he’s squished into the screen with somebody else, a young woman with a smug smile, both of them wearing sweaters that read _Oxford_ in bright white print.  

 

**February 24th, 2010**

“Does Fitz have a sister?”

“No. Why?”

“Oh, no reason.”  

 

**March 11, 2010**

“You’re good with computers right,” Ward asks her early Thursday morning as if it’s the most important thing in the world.

She nods once, stopping her typing to look up at him, “what do you think I do every day?”

“Hack Google?”

“That was once, and super not the point,” Skye informs him, “but you answer your question: yes, I am _good_ with computers.”

“Okay then get dressed.”

“What? Why? Where are we going?”

“The tech support person at my work was fired yesterday, and I’m convincing Coulson to hire you.”

“Are you serious?”

“The longer you sit here, the more likely I am to regret this decision.”

 

**April 1st, 2010**

“This isn’t some sort of sick April Fool’s joke is it?”

“Skye, we wouldn’t joke about this.”

 

**April 2nd 2010**

“You don’t have to do this,” she informs them for probably the hundredth time.

“We can’t you have you living in our spare room forever-”

“Not that we mind!”

“-I was going to say that-”

“Oh please, I’m the nice one in this relationship!”

“You guys are both the nice ones,” Skye tells them, staring at the key in her hand, “I owe you so much. If you ever need a favor, I’m your girl!”

The guys share an almost conspiratorial look that makes her regret saying those words, however the look is gone a moment later, and Skye’s too concerned with the fact that she has a new apartment of her own to care about whatever shenanigans the guys are getting up to.

 

**May 30th 2010**

Skye wakes when it’s still dark outside, responding to the shrill sound of her cellphone ringing. Cursing she rolls over in the bed trying to find her phone and stop its incessant ringing.

It feels like an eternity before she manages to grab it and squint through the blinding light in order to read off who called her. The picture and name combination would normally cause Skye to chuckle, but now she just scowls at the screen.

“You do realize I don’t work on Sundays right,” Skye says first thing when she answers the phone

“Remember last month when you told me that if we ever needed a favor you’d help us out,” Ward says in reply.

That catches her attention at once and Skye sits up in her bed sharply, trying to sense if in Ward’s tone there were any obvious signs that something was wrong, when she comes up with nothing Skye replies, “vaguely.”

“I’m cashing in that favor,” he informs her, “what are you doing on the third?”

“You tell me?”

“We’re getting coffee at the Hub for lunch.”

“You woke me up at four am to set up a lunch date? God, Ward I hate you so fucking much sometimes.”

Her only answer is an almost ominous dial tone.

 


	3. Year 1 (part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FIRST OFF! A million thank yous to everybody that has shown their support for this fic, either here on ao3 or over on tumblr! You are all amazing people and my reason to keep going with this story! 
> 
> As you might have noticed this chapter is labeled "part one" this is because year one ended up turning into such a long chapter that I decided to split it into two - the other half which will be showing up in a day or so ~
> 
> So I hope you enjoy it?

**June 3rd 2010**

 “I’m straight,” she insists to Ward, though when he gives her a skeptical look she adds, “mostly.”

“I know, but it’s not a real marriage,” he explains, “other than a few fake kisses here or there when in public you don’t have to do anything serious. Think of it as a business opportunity.”

“Never before has anybody ever tried to tell me that marrying somebody could be a _business opportunity_ ,” Skye drawls.

“In this case it is,” Ward says gruffly.

He looks as if he’s about to say more, but stops when the chime over the cafe’s door goes off and two people enter.

Had she not known either of them, she would have assumed they were a couple. Both were wearing nearly identical sweaters even with in summer heat, while standing far too close together to be simply casual.

The woman that entered was unfamiliar to her, reddish brown hair tied back in a ponytail, her eyes eagerly searching the cafe.

However, the guy she knew at a glance.

She would have recognized Fitz anywhere, but she had never seen such a nervous and sheepish look on his face in the whole time she had been living with the guys.

Of course, back then she had thought that their marriage was genuine; the way Fitz and Ward coexisted had made her believe that marriage might actually be a real notion, not some fairy tale lie.

Now know the truth of the matter, she felt bile rise up at the back of her throat when Fitz lit up upon seeing Ward.

How could they pretend to love each other so easily?

“Missed you,” Fitz says in greeting, staking the chair at the table beside Ward and then proceeding to steal the other man’s coffee, all in one semi-fluid motion.

Ward makes a small noise of agreement, his hand brushing against his husband’s back almost absentmindedly.

Skye tears her eyes away from their act to instead focus on the woman who has taken the other seat.

She looks slightly awkward to be there, fiddling with her phone though not really paying attention to it, seeming as if she is simply looking for some way to keep her hands busy. She’s attractive in a conventional sense, not the type of person to blow Skye out of the water with her looks, but not completely awful either. When she notices Skye scrutinizing her she looks up and meets her gaze without any of that hesitation she had so clearly shown before.

“You must be Mary Sue,” the woman finally says breaking their eye contact at last.

“I go by Skye, actually,” she corrects, taking a brief moment to glare at where Ward is sitting though he’s not paying them any mind.

“Oh,” the woman echoes, “but you are the one-”

“That will be your green card wife,” Skye finishes her sentence a bit harshly, hoping to get some reaction out of the woman.

Her attempt is unsuccessful, though Fitz does make a shushing noise from his side of the table.

“She’s blunt, you didn’t tell me she’d be blunt,” she says turning look toward Fitz for reassurance.

“Skye, play nice,” Ward says, and she kicks him underneath the table for the comment.

“She’s normally a lot nicer, I swear,” Fitz says to his own defense.

“At least they told you something,” Skye remarks, “I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Jemma, Jemma Simmons,” the woman answers, as if that will solve any questions Skye might have.

It doesn’t not at all, but something clicks in Skye’s head and before she can stop herself she says, “cat liver,” as if she’s just figured out the meaning of life.

She must hit the nail on the head because Jemma sighs and says, “I hate you, Fitz.”

“I know,” he retorts smartly, “now play nice and introduce yourselves.”

“I was trying to,” Jemma says harshly, before turning back to Skye with that same sort of awkward smile, “I’m a twenty-four year old Virgo, who likes cheesy rom-coms and warm tea. I’m a morning person, who hates rainy days, but loves to make cookies when it’s snowing outside. I grew up in a small London townhouse with two wonderful parents and a cat named Lady, attended Oxford where I obtained two PhDs. Recently I was invited to come to the states and work on a project with a research division from Harvard. However, since technically I’m not a student there, I can’t apply for a student visa. My current visa expires at the end of December, and I am at the risk of being deported in six months if I don’t find some way to stay. You’re something like my only hope.”

It sounds like the sort of thing Skye would read on a dating website.

Actually it’s exactly the sort of thing she would have expected to find on a place like that, maybe that was the reason this Jemma Simmons had the whole thing so well-rehearsed.

Was there a dating website that hooked desperate singles up with people who so eagerly wanted green cards?

“It’s nice to meet you,” Skye says after a moment, when she realizes everybody is waiting for her to say something.

“You sound hesitant,” Jemma says, wrinkling her nose in a way that is actually sort of cute, not that Skye was concerned with everything like this.

“Honestly, I’m a bit overwhelmed with everything, Ward sort of ambushed me this morning with all the information and-”

“They did what,” she cuts Skye off, clearly appalled before turning on the guys, “you two told me everything was sorted out already - oh god, this is so awkward - I’m going to kill you both.”

“I knew if I told Skye too soon she’d back out,” Ward admits shrugging, “she’s weird like that. Trust me; this was the way to go about things.”

“I hate you,” Skye informs him, ignoring the little grin and instead turning back to see Jemma’s worried expression, “look it’s no big deal. I’m used to things being thrown at me last minute,” after all, that’s how things had been all her life, “so this isn’t too weird, it’s just a bit out of the ordinary. I mean, it’s not every day some stranger propositions you for marriage.”

“If it makes you feel any better I’ve never done this before either,” Jemma says like she’s confessing some great secret, her tone far more serious than the smile on her face.

The whole notion is a bit silly and Skye finds herself laughing, in spite of the negative feelings she had been attempting to hold onto. When the other woman begins laughing with her, she has to admit there’s a tiny part of her that thinks _okay maybe this could work_.

“Maybe we should ask the two that actually know what they’re doing then,” Skye says between bursts of laughter, turning back to the boys.

Not for the first time she doesn’t wonder if their act is real, Fitz is leaning against Ward’s side while sharing coffee even though it’s well known that Fitz needs to pour half a carton of sugar into any drink to appreciate it and Ward takes his coffee black.

“Well you can’t do it like we did,” Ward starts to explain, “neither you nor Simmons are the type of people to run off to Vegas and get hitched, so there should probably be some sort of ceremony.”

“It’ll have to be soon though,” Fitz continues where his husband left off, “not too close to the deadline, but not so soon that people will be suspicious. Then its three years of being fake married before you can file the application for a citizenship on your own,” he nods his head towards Jemma at that, “a few more months so that nobody is questions anything and then you can cut the knot.”

“So four years,” Skye says.

In four year’s she’ll be twenty-four.

She had never put much thought to what her early twenties would be like, she had hoped to be able to afford a decent apartment at some point during that time, maybe get a real job instead of freelancing as a graphic designer. Never had she factored in that she would be getting married during that time.

In four years she’ll be filing for a divorce from her fake wife.

When she really thought about it didn’t seem like that long of time, might be a funny story to tell years later if she settled down for real.

“I know it seems like a long time, but take it from me the time flies by,” Ward says, and she thinks for a second she sees a hint of remorse in the man’s features but it’s gone a second later.

“I had a thought, well, Fitz suggested it, since it’s what he - uh well, I could pay you for your time,” Jemma says eagerly, “I hate to feel like I’m bribing you, but I’m a bit desperate at this point.”

“Wait, you’re going to pay me to marry you,” she asks.

Ward hadn’t mentioned that part of the deal.

“I told you it was more like a business transaction,” he pointed out, as if he could read her thoughts.

She ignored him instead turning back to Jemma, “how much?”

“Does fifty thousand sound alright?”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” she repeats the words over again.

Fifty thousand dollars could change her life, for someone who has lived in crappy apartments and the back of her van most of her life fifty thousand dollars sounds like nothing short of a miracle.

“Is it not enough,” Jemma asks, “I could add more or-”

“No that’s - that’s more than enough,” Skye says nodding her head eagerly, “so uh… wanna get hitched because I’m down?”

 

**June 3rd 2010**

They pop open bottles of champagne back at Fitz-Ward apartment, the guy’s practically sitting on each other, Buddy the dog clamoring for somebody to let him into their laps, while Skye tried to pretend that this was a normal everyday occurrence - that this wasn’t her celebrating selling her independence.

“Come here Buddy,” Skye calls the dog over to her, in favor of paying attention to him over the other people in the room, “stay away from the lying sons of bitches that bought you.”

“You’re not PMS-ing are you,” Ward asks.

And the “fuck you,” is off of her lips before she can even think about it.

“Skye,” Fitz says faux-scandalized, turning to Jemma in an attempts to reassure her that Skye is a semi-reasonable human being most of the time.

She’s not sure if his reassurances are any good, not sure if she even cares. She’s too busy focusing on the way everybody else interacts in an attempt to pick up the signs she had so clearly missed in the month before when she had been living with them.

“Here’s to marriage,” Fitz says finally, standing up on the cushions of the loveseat, raising his glass into the air. Ward’s hand reaches up reflexively to steady him, in an act that Skye has seen many times before, but it seems less soft now and more something done out of necessity.

“Here’s to, and I never thought I would say it, breaking the law,” Jemma jokes before raising her glass in reply.

“American laws are shit anyways,” Fitz says, reaching forward to clink his glass with hers, “we’re better than them. We’re rebels! Foreign rebels! Rebel spies! We’re like Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia! We’re-”

“I’m suddenly realizing I’ve made a terrible mistake,” Ward deadpans.

“I’m pretty sure you get off to being the bad guy,” Skye retorts, which leads to a round of bickering from the group, each trying to insist that somebody else is breaking way more laws than they are.

Something Skye is certain she would win if she actually bothered to participate, but when the conversation turns to Fitz and Ward ribbing each other about this or that, she elects to just sit back and enjoy the show.

That is until Jemma, who had been standing up, finally settles down taking the seat beside Skye.

“I’m not normally the sort of person that lives on the wild side,” Jemma says before taking a drink, “so I’m sorry for dragging you into all these illegal shenanigans.”

“It’s actually pretty normal for me,” Skye admits with a shrug, “you know, technically this isn’t legal either,” her fingers drumming against the side of the glass.

“Pardon?”

“Drinking,” Skye elaborates, holding her glass out in front of her, “I’m not the legal drinking age until April.”

“What,” Jemma says, suddenly shocked. She whips around towards the guys and says, “you said she was legal?”

“She is,” Fitz answers quickly enough, “the drinking age here is twenty-one, further proving that the states are the worst.”

“You’re the one who wants to be a citizen here,” Skye points out when Jemma nods her head at Fitz’s explanation.

“Doesn’t mean your laws aren’t total shit!”

 

**June 4th 2010**

At some point midnight rolls around and Skye giggles to herself when somebody announces that she only has three years at 364 days left to go. She can’t remember who it is, probably because at some point they shifted from champagne to vodka and she’s never had a particularly high alcohol tolerance.

“We should mark the date,” Skye says, like it’s the greatest idea in the whole of human history. She grabs her phone off of the coffee table, opening her calendar app.

“Don’t save it as divorce day,” Fitz slurs, reaching forward in an attempt to steal her phone away from her, “do something more incon - inco - conspic-” he makes a frustrated huff when he can’t remember the word.

“Inconspicuous,” Jemma supplies for her, having dug into her own purse and returned not with a cell phone, but with a personal planner. She looks so British, all prim and proper, with a pen and a planner.

“What do you two have yours saved as?”

“Water the plants,” both of the guys say at the same time.

“But you guys don’t have any plants,” Skye laughs again.

“That’s the point,” Ward deadpans.

"Alright, we'll we're stealing that," Skye says, setting an alert on the calender in her phone for June 3rd 2014, telling her to water the plants.

 

**June 5th 2010**

She wakes in the morning to the sound of somebody pounding at her apartment’s front door.

Curses the world for all of her bad luck, forgoes even the thought of throwing on pants, and somehow manages to open the door in a timely manner.

She had expected it to be the mailman or one of her many neighbors come to ask for some sort of help, but the woman standing outside her front door in a mint green sundress had never crossed her mind.

“Did I just wake you up,” Jemma asks apologetic in tone.

“How’d you find my address?”

“Fitz gave it to me,” she answers, not even bothered that Skye had avoided answering her question, “I’m sorry I wasn’t thinking, not everybody is as much of a morning person as I am.”

“No - I’m more of a night owl,” Skye replies, suddenly feeling self-conscious standing in her doorway in naught but a bra and panties.

Jemma must realize that around the same time Skye does because she flushes prettily and stares intently at Skye’s face as if it is the most important thing in the world.

“Do you want to come in,” Skye says after a beat of awkward silence.

“That would be lovely,” she replies, needing no further prompting before slipping inside the apartment.

“Uh, make yourself at home,” Skye says before slipping into her bedroom as quickly as possible and pulling on a pair of skinny jeans that she hopes is clean and a Green Lantern shirt that she’s pretty sure had belonged to one of the guys. There’s no time to salvage her hair or put on makeup, but she does tie her hair back so at least it’s not falling all around her face.

When she returns to the living room Jemma is standing in exactly the same place she was when Skye left her, still staring about the room in a look that is either awe or displeasure.

Either way it makes her feel a bit uncomfortable, like her whole life is being scrutinized.

“So,” Skye drawls, “was there something you needed or-”

“Ah, no, I just wanted to stop by really and talk. Girl talk,” Jemma clarifies, giving the world a whole new meaning with her tone, “I finally got the truth out of the guys, and I really am sorry that they’re such dicks about this. We all put you on the spot so suddenly.”

“Like I said before, it’s chill.”

“No, it’s not,” Jemma shakes her head, “if you want to back out, you can just say so, you know that right?”

“And you’ll be deported.”

“I’m sure I could find somebody else,” Jemma insists, “if all else fails I’ll hire a hooker like-”

“Really, a hooker, your standards are that low,” Skye laughs, “no don’t do that, I said before I was down for this and I am. I mean, it’s sort of like an adventure.”

“An adventure,” Jemma repeats the word, marveling at it.

“Sounds better than a business transaction,” she says, attempting to lower her voice and mimic Ward as she says the last two words.

It’s a poor attempt, but Jemma at least seems to find it funny. She brings a hand up to cover her face when she laughs and it’s actually pretty cute.

Really cute.

 

**June 14th 2010**

**_FITZ (09:45:32)_ **

_hypothetically speaking if somebody were to propose to you_

_how would you want it to go???_

**_SKYE (09:46:01)_ **

_Jemma could easily ask me herself, you do realize that right?_

 

**June 15th 2010**

“So Fitz wanted me to ask,” Ward starts as they’re on their way to lunch.

“No,” she replies, before he can even finish the sentence, “we’re not playing telephone. Either I’m going to be completely surprised or she’s going to ask me herself.”

“Would you believe me if I said I was going to ask a completely different question?”

“Not in the slightest.”

 

**June 17th 2010**

When they do finally meet up it’s in a park.

A park that she had walked through many times in the past and never considered it to be particularly important.

A park that years down the road Skye will return to, when things are bad or when things are good, this is the park that she will find herself crying in years later cursing the world for being unfair and it’s the same park she will stumble through in the wee hours of the morning singing off-tune karaoke with the most important people in her life.

However, in that moment, on the seventeenth of June, this park held no significance to her.

It was nothing more than the place Jemma had texted her that morning asking to meet around noon.

Jemma is already there waiting for her when Skye finally arrives fashionably late. She’s couched down talking with some kids who wave about a magnifying glass, so intent on whatever the kids have to say that she doesn’t even notice Skye’s approach until the she’s right upon her.

It’s almost cute the way Jemma jumps when she notices her, before expressing her apologies to the kids and insisting that she had a wonderful time talking with them.

“You’re good with kids,” Skye states, “I’m assuming you had younger siblings.”

“Actually I’m an only child,” Jemma admits, “I guess I’m just a child at heart?”

“Well, you are friends with Fitz.”

“Too true,” she agrees with a laugh.

“Speaking of Fitz-”

“Please tell me he didn’t text you,” Jemma all but pleads.

When Skye offers a little smile, it’s as good as admitting the truth, because Jemma lets out a groan.

“I have the worst friends in the entire world.”

“ _We_ have the worst friends,” Skye corrects.

“I’m assuming he asked you about this,” Jemma says, reaching into her pocket to pull out a velvet box.

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what’s on the inside and Skye nods her head, “I believe they were trying to get me to tell them what my dream proposal would be like.”

Jemma groans once more. “If I murder them will you be my alibi?”

“Of course.”

They walk for a bit more, Jemma rattling off some evil plan about how she plans to take down Fitz and Ward in their sleep before she stops, trailing off and looking at the clouds above them in an almost whimsical fashion.

“You know their question still stands?”

“And what’s that,” Skye prompts already knowing the question, but enjoying the slight color that rises to Jemma’s cheeks when she’s forced to ask herself.

“If this was your happily ever after, your Cinderella story, how would you want this to go?”

As a child she had sometimes imagined things like this, a faceless person who swept her off her feet and away from all the bad things happening in her life, who kissed Skye like they were drowning and only had seconds left to live, but were unable to leave each other for a second. She might have imagined a lazy Sunday afternoon, making out on a couch in a shared apartment, where the person she loved most in the world would look up at her breathless and say _‘marry me.’_

But Skye had learned long ago that her life wasn’t a movie and that the stories everybody told were never true.

“I don’t believe in happily ever after, but you know,” Skye waves her hand about dramatically adopting a teasing tone, “something public and showy and the sort of thing that awkwardly puts the other person on the spot because there are, at least twenty other pairs of eyes watching them, expecting to hear them say ‘Yes! A thousand times yes!’ like we’re in a Jane Austen novel would be my dream come true.”

“In that case,” Jemma stops walking so suddenly that Skye doesn’t notice it until she has taken two steps forward and has to turn back.

_“I was joking_ ,” Skye wants to say, but she somehow doesn’t manage to get the words out. Though from the grin on the other woman’s face, she so clearly had known that Skye was being sarcastic.

Not that that has stopped her from dropping to one knee in the middle of the park.

Skye’s heart pounds in her chest even though she already knows what is coming and even though she already knows her answer.

“There’s a lot of things I could say right now, things I rehearsed hours before coming to this park, but looking at you right now, I can’t seem to remember any of them,” Jemma says in a voice loud enough to draw attention to them, but Skye doesn’t care about anybody else who might be watching, her eyes are locked with Jemma’s unable to tear herself away, “I guess I’ll just say the only words that matter. Skye, Mary Sue Poots, will you do me the honor of having you as a wife?”

And maybe she does feel a little bit like she’s in a Jane Austen novel when she says, “yes, yes of course,” and it feels real.

Jemma pushes herself up off the ground at that, takes the ring out of its box and slides it on Skye’s finger before pulling her into a hug.

“We should probably kiss,” Jemma whispers into her ear, “it’s what everybody watching is expecting.”

“Yeah, we should, yeah,” Skye replies louder than a whisper, and without thinking about it she just does it, her hand cupping Jemma’s face and bringing their lips together for their very first kiss.

There’s no fireworks exploding behind her eyes, but there’s something there, something that leaves Skye breathless when they finally pull back at the applause of their impromptu audience.

“Wow.”

 

**June 18th 2010**

“What do you mean you don’t have a Facebook?”

“I’m not big on social media,” Jemma confesses.

Skye groans theatrically, “our first fight is going to be over your need to enter the twenty-first century and get a Facebook.”

“It’s an inconvenience, having to update it with every significant moment in your life,” she insists, “I just don’t see the need to make everything so public.”

Skye ignores her, in favor of opening up Facebook herself and taking matters into her own hands.

“What’s your birthday,” she asks, typing in the information she already knows.

“September 11th, why,” Jemma asks, before the realization must dawn on her because she says, “you’re not - are you?”

“I most certainly am,” Skye grins up at her, “because how else am I going to prove to the world that I’m engaged to a _real_ person.”

 

**June 19th 2010**

She spends most of Monday morning receiving congratulations on her engagement from her coworkers. Her boss pats her on the shoulder and wishes her the best after she’s called in to fix an exceedingly minor computer problem for him. Everybody seems to be perfectly willing to accept the idea that Skye’s engaged, even though she knows for a fact that none of them had even heard her mention the other woman’s existence.

It seems as though everything will go off without a hitch, until as she breaks for lunch she finds a familiar face sitting outside her office’s building.

He waves his hand in the air to signal her over; as if she could have missed the obnoxious highlighter yellow shirt he’s wearing.

“What do you want,” Skye says abruptly when she approaches him.

He smiles back at her unbothered by the tone and says, “missed you too.”

To say that they had a complicated history would be putting it lightly, everything about Miles Lydon could be summed up with _It’s complicated_. They’ve known each other for years, since Skye was a desperate high school dropout running away from her latest foster home and Miles was a twenty-two year old on the run from the law hiding out in internet cafes. He taught her most everything she knew about computers, taught her how to hack and how to not get caught. He also taught her how to lie, cheat, and steal - back when she was too innocent to even think of doing things like that on her own.

He knew her better than most people did, which was never a good thing.

“I heard through the grapevine that you’re getting married,” Miles says faux-casual, tucking his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“You mean you checked Facebook.”

“Something like that,” he says dismissively.

“I am,” she says, because there’s no reason to deny it, “we haven’t set a date yet, but-”

“I’m calling bullshit,” Miles cuts her off.

She narrows her eyes at him as if to insist that his opinion doesn’t matter in the slightest, but Miles knows her too well.

“Fuck you.”

“And that is _exactly_ why I’m calling bullshit,” Miles smirks, “there’s no way the Skye I know settles down with some goody-two-shoes scientist. I spent years trying to get you to settle down and nothing.”

“Haven’t you heard I’m a lesbian,” she says a bit too angrily, “and even if I wasn’t it’s none of your goddamned business!”

“So you admit it-”

“Just fuck off, Miles-”

“Is this guy bothering you,” an abrupt voice cuts off her angry conversation wand Skye turns about to snap at whoever it is that she’s fine until she sees Ward standing there, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, shoulders squared like he’s ready for a fight.

Her eyes flicker back to Miles for a moment, the hacker offering a more sheepish smile now.

“Actually, yeah he is.”

 

**July 3rd 2010**

They’ve got wedding magazines spread out over the floor of Skye’s apartment, along with a white poster board that they’re covering with various pictures from the magazines to create their dream wedding.

She’s not certain that they’re doing this right, not even certain that there’s a right way to do this, but this sort of feels fun.

“Look at these,” Jemma says, tearing out a page from the magazine to show Skye.

She’s not entirely certain which part of the arrangement she is supposed to be looking at, but she nods her head anyways and marvels at the way Jemma smiles before turning back to her magazine once more.

Who knew planning a fake wedding could be so fun?

 

**July 11th 2010**

The first time she sleeps over it’s an accident, they’re in Jemma’s cheap hotel room going over wedding plans, double checking everything while watching a terrible movie on the hotel’s pay-per-view system.

One second they’re watching Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone try to work out their romantic differences while fighting zombies and the next she’s waking up as the sunlight streams through the cheap curtains in an unfamiliar bed with a rather comfortable weight beside her.

Maybe it’s because Skye’s half-asleep and maybe it’s because she keeps having the same recurring dream about walking down the aisle, but when she rolls over slightly to take in the features of the woman beside her she cannot help herself from thinking that Jemma looks incredibly peaceful as she sleep.

It’s enough to convince Skye to close her eyes once more, snuggle closer to her, and slip back into her slumber.

Hours later when they’re laughing about how they both fell asleep before the movie ending, running hands through awful bedhead trying to smooth it down, Skye finds herself saying, “we should get an apartment together.”

And Jemma replies, “I thought you’d never ask.”

 

**July 21st 2010**

Skye has seen what feels like a hundred apartments over the past week or so.

Possibly more than that.

She feels like it shouldn’t be this hard for them to find a place, her most recent apartment had been picked out for her by the guys and she is suddenly very thankful that they took matters into their own hands versus her having to do these things herself.

As far as Skye is concerned real estate agents are complete morons and she’s liable to snap at the next one that cannot understand their simple requests for their apartment.

By some miracle Jemma has the patience to deal with them, it’s probably her prim and proper British manners helping out, because she just smiles at the realtor and says, “no, we _need_ a spare room,” or “this kitchen is much too small,” in the sort of kind and level tone which had left Skye weeks before.

“I think you’ll really like this place,” the realtor says, fumbling with the keys to the latest apartment.

Skye stares up at the chipped paint on the numbers of the door to apartment 616, and replies, “I highly doubt that.”

“Don’t mind her,” Jemma says too quickly, her hand reaching up to give Skye’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze, “she’s just very picky.”

The realtor makes a noise of agreement and Skye sticks her tongue out at her when only Jemma can see. Her fiancé laughs under her breath, her hand going up to rub at her neck like she usually does when she laughs.

“Play nice,” Jemma tells her, but the words are half-hearted and Skye doesn’t intend to listen to them.

“I’m just being honest,” Skye replies, bumping shoulders with Jemma.

Less than an hour later though Skye finds herself eating her words as she stands in the middle of what she imagines will one day be their living room and announces, “It’s perfect.”

 

**August 1st 2010**

She turns the key over and over again in her hand; the weight of the metal suddenly feels so much heavier than it ought to.

It feels like the point of no return which is silly, if anything should have felt like the point of no return than it should have been the ring that has been sitting on her finger for a month and a half, and yet, it is the key that gives her pause.

The key to her - no, to _their_ apartment.

Skye feels trapped in that moment, her fingers rubbing along the ridges of the key, waiting to unlock the door and to join the rest of her friends.

She takes one last deep breath to steady herself before she opens the door letting the noise of the three people she cares about the most in the world wash over her.

 

**August 2nd 2010**

“Skye, have you seen the box I labeled pajamas,” Jemma asks, on their first night living together.

Most everything they own is still packed up and will probably remain that way for the better part of the week since they both have work and there never seems to be enough evening hours.

Skye had thankfully kept her laptop in a relatively easy to find location and had spent the last few hours working through a particularly difficult part of code, only to be pulled out of her coding trance at the sound of Jemma’s slightly frantic question.

“Uh, no I-” Skye starts to say, pulling her eyes away from the screen only to freeze when she actually lays eyes on the other woman. Jemma’s hair is damp and dark over her shoulders, while she stands there wearing naught more than a fluffy blue towel that barely covers her up.

Her throat dries at the sight before her, because somehow had she missed the fake that her fake fiancé was incredibly attractive. Now though it’s all so striking that Skye can’t find it in her to tear her eyes away and form any of the words she needs to.

“Skye,” she prompts again.

“Jemma.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” the other woman smiles, “have you seen my pajama box?”

Skye shakes her head, finally pulling her gaze away from the freshly showered Jemma Simmons to turn to the pile of boxes that are currently taking up the vast majority of their living area. Though finding none labeled in Jemma’s neat handwriting.

“I found mine already,” Skye offers, closing her laptop and rising up from the couch all in one motion, “you could borrow some?”

“Are you sure,” Jemma asks, “I mean - it would be better than sleeping in this.”

Skye finds herself wanting to disagree with that, particularly since she’s the type of person to usually sleep in a camisole and panties, if that, but she does have a few pairs of real pajamas that the guys had bought her back when she had been living with them.

She signals for Jemma to follow her into the room that Skye has claimed as her own, before sorting through her drawers to pull out a pair of purple flannel bottoms and a matching camisole.

“My hero” Jemma announces, accepting the articles of clothing, and without even waiting for Skye to leave, letting her towel down and slipping into them.

The pants are a bit long on her, the shirt a bit loose, but she looks like a movie star and she smiles at Skye like she’s just give her a million dollars.

 

**August 6th 2010**

She’d been up all night battling a computer virus that she was pretty sure came from a certain old friend of hers who might still be pissed about the fact that she left Ward to deal with him.

It’s only when the sun shone through the windows that Skye realized she had yet to move from her seat in the living room.

Sluggishly she gets up, ignoring the pounding in her head that comes from staring at a computer screen for too long and heading to the bathroom in hopes that a quick shower will help her wake up enough to actually make it into work today. Coulson’s a forgiving boss, and she’s sure that if she makes up some excuse about her fiancé and moving into a new apartment he will understand, but she needs the money and thus needs to be semi-awake in case anybody in the office has some sort of computer problem.

Her fingers clutch onto the bathroom door’s handle, moving to turn it open only to be met with the resistance of it being locked.

“Sorry, I’ll be just a moment,” comes a voice from the inside, and it takes Skye an exceedingly long second before her sleep deprived mind seems to understand why the door is locked.

“It’s alright take your time,” Skye says, leaning her head against the door, the feeling of cold wood vaguely helping with her headache.

She’s not certain how long it is before the door opens and Skye stumbles forward a bit only to be steadied by Jemma’s hand on her shoulder.

“Are you alright,” the other woman asks, her spare hand reaching up to check Skye’s forehead. After having determined that she’s not running a fever Jemma looks Skye up and down once more before asking, “coffee or tea?”

“Uh, both, yes,” Skye mumbles.

“I’ll put on the kettle,” Jemma says, stepping out of the way to let Skye into the bathroom.

Ten minutes later she’s showered and feeling a little bit more awake when she stumbles into the kitchen following the whistle of the kettle.

“I was wondering why you were up so early,” Jemma says, pressing a mug of steaming tea into her hands when she enters the kitchen, “the last few days I’ve been up and out the door before you even arise.”

This was certainly true; in the last few days Skye had learned that Jemma was very much a morning person. By the time Skye would emerge from her room, hair a mess, Jemma would be telling her that coffee was in the pot or tea in the kettle before heading out the front door.

Then again, Skye stayed up a lot later than she did.  

“I pulled an all-nighter,” Skye explains.

“I noticed.” Her words could have come off as harsh, and perhaps on another person it might have, but coming from Jemma Simmons it almost sounded fond.

Of course, that could just be Skye’s still sleep deprived mind jumping to unreasonable conclusions.

 

**August 21 2010**

“Leopold, your first name is Leopold,” Skye says as soon as Fitz has picked up the phone.

On the other end she hears a handful of muffle curses.

Somehow in her months of living with Fitz and Ward she had never managed to catch Fitz’s proper name, but now with the information written in Jemma’s neat script across a piece of cardstock, she couldn’t help herself from jumping on the opportunity.

“How did you even-”

“Wedding invitations, my dear Leopold,” she teases.

“Two can play that game, Mary Sue.”

She ignores him, in favor reading off the Wikipedia article pulled up on her laptop, “Leopold comes from two Germanic words, the first Leo meaning lion and the second part meaning brave. Your name is Brave Lion, it’s like wow,” Skye says, continuing to scan the article, “have you ever read _Ulysses_?”

He hangs up without giving her an answer.

 

**August 25th 2010**

“You’ve reached Jemma-” “-and Skye!” “We’re not home at the moment to take your call, so please leave a message after the beep and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!”

**_BEEP!!_ **

“Hello, this is Jasper Sitwell with the United States Office of Immigration. If you could call me back at your convenience, I would like to schedule a meeting between us. Thank you.”

 

**August 27th 2010**

Friday night has become their movie night, or more like the night where they put on a movie in the background and attempt to make plans for their wedding at the same time. At some point their ability to multi-task seems to evaporate and they end up squashed together on the couch with one of Jemma’s many quilts draped over them.

It has easily turned into another one of those nights, as they curl up together watching the latest romantic lead try to sort through her love life before her wedding night while ABBA songs play along with every important moment.

The best part of the night by far though has to be the fact that Jemma has so clearly seen this movie plenty of times and is prepared for each musical number, belting out the lyrics to each and every song without a care in the world.

By the time Dancing Queen comes on, Jemma’s pulling her up off of the couch insisting that they simply must dance along.

“Promise me you won’t play this song at our wedding,” Skye says, when she finally let’s herself get tugged up off of the couch.

“I make no promises!”

 

**September 11th 2010**

“Has anybody ever mentioned how as a future citizen of the glorious United States of America, you have the worst birthday in the world,” Skye says once the clock strikes midnight.

The credits for their from their latest movie night rolling in the background, Jemma smiles up at her sleepily from beneath a cocoon of blankets, “you know I might have heard that one before.”

“Yes well, your amazing fake fiancé would like to remind you of this fact,” Skye laughs, “seeing as it is your birthday.”

“No,” Jemma shakes her head, “it’s too late to be my birthday, and it’s not my birthday until I have slept for eight hours at a minimum.”

“I’m not sure how that’s birthdays work,” she points out, “now you just sit there and I’ll be right back.”

“Oh, I wasn’t planning on moving.”

Skye ignores Jemma’s attempts to snuggle back into her blankets and pass out on the couch and instead slips off into her room, carefully hunting through her closet for the gift she had picked out days before with the help of Fitz. Eventually her fingers grasp onto the side of the box and Skye pulls it out, to bring back to where Jemma is still sitting on the couch.

She blinks up at Skye when she presents the wrapped box.

“You didn’t have to.”

“No, I kind of did,” Skye says, “I mean, we’re getting married and all.”

“Oh-”

“And even if we weren’t. I just - I’ve never had any girl friends before. I’ve been alone most of my life, and the few friends I had were guys. So even though us meeting and becoming friends happened under what are probably some of the weirdest circumstances in the world, I just want to let you know that I’m happy that we met. You’re my best friend Jemma, even if that sounds sort of crazy - I just - yeah, Happy Birthday.”

 

**September 11th 2010**

Jemma’s official birthday party happens much later, back in their apartment with Fitz and Ward and three very expensive bottles of alcohol, since they couldn’t exactly go out to a bar for the night when one member of their group wasn’t yet twenty-one.

Honestly, Skye’s sort of happy they’re doing in this way, it almost feels like any other night, if she ignored the cake that was sitting half-eaten on their coffee table and the obscene amount of party poppers that had left their pathetic attempts at confetti on the floor.

“Sorry we couldn’t go out to a bar,” Skye apologizes, once again, when Jemma refills her red cup with the mixed drink concoction that Ward had whipped up for them.

“I told you, it’s fine” Jemma insists, “we’ll all go out and get completely smashed for your birthday.”  

“Completely smashed,” Fitz agrees from his place on the couch, clearly eavesdropping on their conversation, “we could even go to Vegas!”

“No,” Ward says abruptly.

“Okay, fine,” Fitz pouts, “but we’ll do something special, because twenty-one is way better than twenty-five.”

“You’re just jealous because you’re younger than me,” Jemma teases him, pushing Fitz off where he had been perched on the side of the couch.

“Am not!”

**September 15th 2010**

She’s already in a bad mood that she had to take time off of work for this, but sitting in the crowded Immigration Office’s sitting room does absolutely nothing to improve her mood. Jemma’s nervous beside her, her foot tapping an awkward rhythm against the floor, because for all of her assurances to Skye that this is simply procedure and nothing to be worried about, it is clear that the whole thing has gotten to her. The night before, Jemma had confessed to her in a panicked tone that she was an awful liar and told Skye that if things went wrong that she could and should throw Jemma under the bus to protect herself.

Not that Skye would do that, she had a bit more morals than that.

At least, she liked to think that she did.

“Just breathe,” Skye whispers under her breath, reaching out to grab Jemma’s hand and squeeze it to reassure her. The other woman latches onto her hand like it’s a lifeline, like it’s the only thing keeping her grounded, and Skye let’s her.

“That’s easier said than done,” Jemma whispers back to her, before slumping forward to lean her head against Skye’s shoulder.

“I know, babe, I know.”

Time seems to tick even slower, but her anger dissipates ever so slightly the longer Jemma leans against her and the tighter she holds her hand.

After nearly an eternity, a bald man in a fine-pressed black suit opens the door and calls out, “Miss Poots and Miss Simmons.”

Skye grimaces at the name and says, “that’s us,” tugging Jemma up.

It’s only once they reach the guy that Jemma seems to come back to herself enough to say, “it’s Doctor Simmons,” in the snide and smug tone that Skye had most certainly missed.

“My mistake,” he says, leading them out of the waiting room and down the hall to his office, “my name’s Jasper Sitwell, we spoke on the phone.”

“Oh, yes.”

The office they’re led into is relatively cramped, two bookshelves take up the sides along the walls, and a handful of knickknacks decorate a rather small text with a name plaque that reads _J. Sitwell_ in gold lettering.

He gestures to two seats across from the desk, matching red chairs that they settle down into with slight unease.

“Now, this meeting is just a formality. We’re not accusing either of you of anything, just meeting to test the waters. If all goes well you should be out of here in less than an hour and we’ll likely never have to see each other again-”

“Really,” Skye says, her tone sharp, “you make us come here in the middle of a work day for an hour long meeting for a formality?”

“Skye,” Jemma warns.

“No this is so idiotic, I just can’t-”

“I’m sorry, what was it you called Miss Poots,” Sitwell asks, cutting in and glancing towards Jemma.

“Skye, it’s her name,” she explains, “or what she prefers to go by.”

“I see,” he says, before scrawling something down on the pad of paper in front of him.

That can’t be good.

“You’re not a prostitute, Miss Poots, are you?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Given your acquaintances-”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Skye, please,” Jemma says, reaching out to grab onto her, as if that will calm her down, as if that will stop her temper from flaring.

It doesn’t work in fact it only makes her more angry, so what if the Immigration Officer is right, so what if they are faking all of this, she doesn’t need his condescending tone or his scratching against the paper to know any of that.

“I know what this really is about,” Skye says suddenly, “I’ve met enough people like you to understand where this is coming from. I bet if Jemma was a James, this wouldn’t be a problem at all, but because we’re two women suddenly you’re questioning the legitimacy of our relationship.”

“That’s not-”

“Really, it’s not? Can you honestly look me in the eyes and admit that the reason we’re sitting in _this_ office has nothing to do with the fact that we’re both women.”

“I would prefer not to lie to you.”

“So you admit it?”

“No. That’s not what I-”

“Of course not. Well, let me spell it out for you Mr. Sitwell, a few months ago a mutual friend introduced us and every second after that has been a whirlwind romance that I have never been happier to be a part of. So I am not going to let you tell us, less than two months from our wedding day that we can’t be married because you have some weird fear of lesbians, because on November fifth, I am going to be walking down the aisle and marrying the most important person in the world to me. End of story,” Skye all but spit out the words and as soon as they were out there stood up from her seat, grabbing Jemma’s hand and tugging her up as well, “come on, we’re done here.”

“We can’t just walk out,” Jemma starts.

“The hell we can’t,” she insists, and this time when she leads towards the door Jemma followers, their hands still locked together as they weave their way out of the Immigration Office and back to the waiting room.

There are footfalls behind them, but Skye doesn’t give a damn about what he has to say. She only cares about Jemma squeezing her hand.

“That was incredible,” Jemma says in a voice that’s slightly like awe when they’ve reached the waiting room, “you were incredible.”

“I was,” she replies, slightly startled by the awe in Jemma’s tone, before repeating it more confidently, “I was.”

“My hero,” maybe it’s because they’re in the immigration office, maybe it’s because they’re trying to pull off the act before the Immigration Officer’s eyes, or maybe it’s because Jemma’s beaming at her and a bit breathless, but for the second time in her life, Skye leans in and kisses Jemma.

 

**September 25th 2010**

Picking out wedding dresses always seemed so awful if the movies and endless TLC programming they had watched over the past few months were anything to go off of. Which was why for the whole week Skye had stared at the day that Jemma had labeled _Wedding Dress Shopping_ on their calendar, as though if she could glare at it long enough it might go away.

And yet, hours later, after trying on four completely awful dresses, Skye was finding that she rather enjoyed herself.

“I look like a cupcake, don’t I,” Skye says, pushing down the poof of fabric that she could probably hide an entire young soccer team under.

“I do like cupcakes,” Jemma insists, giggling and covering her face as the color rises up on her cheeks, “but it’s not exactly flattering to your figure.”

“Nothing is flattering to my figure,” she says, shaking her hips back and forth as she stares into the mirror. “I might just have to marry you in the nude, it’s the only way to do this.”

“At least, it’s better than Fitz’s suggestion.”

“I could still do,” Skye says, “I’ll paint my body red and wear the mask, while you shave your head and buy an orange jumpsuit.”

Jemma shrieks, “we are _not_ doing that! I’m not shaving my head!”

“I think you’d look great!”

“No no no,” she insists, “I am no Natalie Portman, it will look awful.”

“You’re right, you’re ten times cuter than she is,” Skye says with a thoughtful nod, “but Jemma, I just don’t know what else we can do? I’m clearly hopeless and out of options.”

“Clearly,” Jemma agrees, offering a sympathetic smile to the sales employee that had been helping them out, before turning back to Skye, “Why don’t you go change back into your jeans and I’ll go try some on instead.”

She thinks she hears the sales employee mutter, “thank god,” but Skye doesn’t care, because she’s off of the little platform they use to display the dresses and hurrying back to the dressing room.

By the time she’s out of the dressing room, Jemma is already busying herself among the racks of wedding dresses. So Skye settles herself on the couch to wait and finally checks her phone, waiting for her are a series of texts from the guys, because apparently Jemma had secretly snapped pictures of each of Skye’s awful dresses and sent them off. She types back rapid fire crude responses to each of them.

“Skye,” Jemma says, and she looks up from the screen of her phone to where Jemma stands holding a bundle of fabric in her arms, “I’m going to try this one on, I’ll be right back.”

“Good luck,” Skye encourages her.

Maybe Jemma will have better luck that Skye had with the dresses.

“You two are cute together,” the sales employee says when Jemma is off changing, and while Skye’s certain that she must say that to every couple that comes in, she can’t help herself from smiling.

“Thanks.”

When Jemma emerges from the dressing room, Skye looks up from her phone ready to dismiss the dress only to find no complaints about the dress.

What are the odds that the first dress she picks happens to be the best thing Skye’s ever seen?

“You’re beautiful,” she says, honestly.

“Oh shush you,” Jemma teases, but her eyes light up, and Skye can tell she took the compliment to heart.

She looks incredible, like one of those fairytale brides, and Skye doesn’t even believe in fairytales, but seeing Jemma in that dress makes her believe for a moment.

“Twirl for me,” Skye calls out, ignoring the disapproving glance from the sales employee, “Jemma, please!”

This is going to be Skye’s wedding and if she wants to her see her wife twirling about like a Disney princess then surely she has that right.

Jemma doesn’t seem to mind the demand, for a moment later she’s stepping in tiny circles, the carefully pinned up dress losing a few of its pins as the fabric spins with her. Her hair falls out of its loose arrangement, falling free down over her shoulders and going with the motion. Jemma’s laughing like she’s the happiest person in the world, smiling like she’s the luckiest girl in the universe, all while twirling around uncontrollably like a child’s toy.

And it hits her, like a freight train with no way of stopping, the surge of emotions that makes her entire chest tight, as she realizes she might have fallen for her fake fiancé.

When did that happen?

 

**October 12th 2010**

“Our reservation for dinner with my parents is in two hours and-”

“Woah, what?”

“My parents,” Jemma explains, “My father is giving a talk at Boston University, we went over this last week. They wanted to meet you, you said tonight was okay before, but if it’s not now I can call and try to reschedule.”

“No, that’s fine,” Skye says, wondering how she could have forgotten about something this important, she supposed it had something to do with the fact that she never had parents of her own, nobody important that needed to meet her future wife and scrutinize her. “I just- do they know?”

Jemma gives her a puzzled look for a moment, before the realizations hits her and, “oh yes! They’re both one hundred percent in support of our plan.”

“Okay, cool.”

“Honestly, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“That’s easy for you to say. They’re your parents, they have to love you, and I’m the strange woman that’s corrupting their daughter’s innocence!”

“Technically I’m older so if anyone was doing the corrupting-”

“It would obviously be the crazy American, seeing as you're all prim and proper and British!”

 

**October 30th 2010**

“I still can’t believe you guys scheduled your joint bachelorette party for the night before Halloween,” Fitz says, though really shouldn’t be complaining, since she’s certain that he’s holding his fourth drink all of which have been charged to her tab.

“Once it hits midnight it’s officially Halloween,” she says, “and I wanted an excuse to wear a skimpy costume, so sue me.”

“Somebody’s sassy,” he teases, poking at her, “you wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”

“It’s ten pm, even if I had, it wouldn’t matter now-”

“True true,” he agrees, tipping his glass back and finishing it.

“Out of curiosity, how many of those do you plan on drinking,” Skye asks when she watches Fitz order yet another.

“I’m Scottish, love,” he explains, “I could drink twenty of these and still feel sober.”

“Please don’t.”

“Don’t you have a fiancé to be bugging,” he says waving her off, and as if on cue Jemma appears at her shoulder.

“Dance with me,” she says, giddy and slightly drunk herself.

Skye knows there’s no way she could deny Jemma, not tonight, so she lets herself be drawn into the throng of people that she only vaguely knows, and pretends for a moment that she’s in her own little world where the only thing that matters is the woman who dressed like slutty Sleeping Beauty and dancing with her.   

And when the next song comes on and it’s Dancing Queen, Skye doesn’t even care that Jemma had planned the whole thing, just belts the lyrics along with her and dances like nobody is watching.

 

**October 31st 2010**

“We should have hired strippers! We’ve got a pole and everything!”

Jemma giggles, nodding her head enthusiastically, “well, Ward’s somewhere around here, perhaps we could-”

“No. Not even for you two.”

“Don’t be a party pooper!”

“Fitz, your husband is a party pooper!”

“Graaaaant,” Fitz whines, finally drunk.

“No. Not a chance.”

 

**November 3rd 2010**

“Uh, hey hi there, can I have your attention,” Skye coughs awkwardly standing up, her flute of champagne raised in a half-hearted toast, “I guess rehearsal dinners are usually the groom’s gig, like the bride does the wedding, the groom does this whole thing. The problem is with me and Jemma there isn’t exactly a groom. So while she, my extremely organized though sometimes a bit frantic dream girl, took care of literally everything else, I offered to be in charge of this.”

Skye gazes out on the small gathering of their family and friends, minor in comparison to the amount of people that would be invited for the wedding in two days. They’re all waiting on her to continue, and while nerves have never really gotten to her before, now making this little toast they seem to be on the rise - that is until Jemma reaches out a hand to steady her.

“So far, so good, right guys?” There’s a little laugh that is enough to give Skye the boost needs, and with her spare hand she grabs onto Jemma’s and squeezes it right back.

“I may not entirely know what I’m doing most of the time, a lot of the time, and I’m usually pretty okay with that. I’m good at just taking what life throws at me and rolling with it,” she admits, “meeting this wonderful woman at first seemed like another one of those times, moments where I would just have to square my shoulders and learn to go with the crazy flow of the world around me.”

She finds Fitz and Ward at that, smiles when both guys shoot her reassuring thumbs up.

“I hadn’t known it at the time, but meeting Jemma was quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I am so lucky to be standing up here right now, rambling to you when you all just want to dig into your food, because it means I’m with _her._ ”

 

**November 4th 2010**

“I’m getting married,” Skye says, staring at the mirror in front of her, “in less than twenty-four hours I’m getting married.”

Skye had never given much thought to what the night before her wedding would feel like; she supposed that there ought to be some sort of butterflies in her stomach or some other silly romantic notion. She had most certainly never factored in that the night before her wedding she would be standing in the bathroom with her bride-to-be wearing a set of matching pajamas listening to some Taylor Swift song playing over the radio.

“We’re getting married,” Jemma corrects.

The way she says it makes it seem as if the distinction is important.

And perhaps it is for a second later Skye corrects her own words, “in less than twenty-four hours _we’re_ getting married.”

 

**November 5th 2010**

She’s standing in front of the mirror in her wedding dress when it sort of hits her that this is it.

“You’re not thinking of running away now,” a voice asks from behind her and looks for his reflection in the mirror to stick out her tongue in reply, “very mature.”

“It’s my wedding day,” Skye says, “I’m allowed to be immature.”

“Touché,” Ward says, giving in and moving to stand behind her, “you look nice.”

“Jemma picked it out,” she informs him, “speaking of which, have you seen her yet?”

He nods his head, “you both look nice.”

“Very descriptive,” Skye replies sarcastically.

She stares back at her reflection once more, fidgets slightly, fingers brushing down the fabric.

“What if I was thinking about running away,” she asks after a moment, “what if I wasn’t sure that I could do this?”

“I’d drive the runaway car if you asked me to,” Ward offers, and Skye can’t help herself from wondering when she got such amazing friends.

This time last year she would never have imagined her life could be like this, certainly she never imagined that she was about to get married, but it was more than just that - it was like she had a family now.

She doesn’t even realize she’s crying until Ward stuffs a tissue into her hand.

“You knew I was going to start crying?”

“I had a hunch,” he shrugs.

“It was a good hunch,” she admits, crumpling the used tissue up in her hand as she takes a deep breath to steady herself, “I’m not going to run away.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, yeah it is - I suppose since you’re here that means that it’s time.”

“It’s now or never.”

“Now - now is good.”

This is the moment she had been waiting for for the last few months, this was the moment where everything changed, the point of no return, and the thought probably ought to make her nervous as she followers along with Ward down to where the ceremony will begin, but for once Skye feels just right.

She feels like she’s floating on air when it all begins.

They had agreed that neither of them would walk down the center aisle, mostly because Skye had nobody to give her away, and Jemma had found the notion incredibly outdated. Instead they would walk in from opposite ends in the front and meet before the altar as the music plays. It was all carefully planner, but for a second she stumbles missing her cue to get out there and walk to meet Jemma in the center, because they meet eyes across the way and all thoughts fly out of Skye’s mind at once.

Skye doesn’t feel like she’s able to think clearly even as they step together and the ceremony begins, it all feels so real, like an out of body experience.

She only finally feels like she’s been dragged back to earth when the man behind the altar says, “by the power invested in my by the state of Massachusetts, I know pronounce you wife and wife, you may kiss.”

It’s then as they kiss for the third time in their entire relationship, her wedding kiss, that Skye finally feels the fireworks she had expected to see back the first time they had kissed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some notes/disclaimers: 
> 
> 1\. I have never been a part of a green card marriage so I am not entirely certain how all of these things work. I apologize for anything that I may have gotten wrong with the workings of this story.  
> 2\. The movies mentioned in this chapter are Zombieland, Mamma Mia, and V for Vendetta.  
> 3\. Because I am an uncreative loser, I just used the actors/actresses birthdays for the character's birthdays in this story. 
> 
> That's all for now ~


	4. year 1 (part 2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here is the second part of year one!
> 
> Also a special shout out goes to [ gleeky-mikaboo](http://gleeky-mikaboo.tumblr.com/) over on tumblr, who correctly guessed why Ward hates Vegas ~

**November 5th 2010**

“Sometimes you just have to dance like nobody is watching,” Jemma had told her many times before, during impromptu musical numbers in their living room, but now as she whispered the words again it seemed to be the encouragement that she needed.

“This time there’s actually people watching,” Skye replies, her hand shaking only slightly as Jemma grabs takes it into her own.

“Then it’s a good thing you’ve had practice.”

When the DJ starts the music, she feels closes her eyes and tries to imagine that they’re back in their apartment, that there’s nobody else watching and the song is coming out of their cheap radio.

For a second she can almost imagine it, so when she finally flickers her eyes back open and meets Jemma’s she feels much better.

Jemma’s softly singing along to the lyrics of the song, her voice barely loud enough for Skye to hear, but as the course rolls around she finds herself wanting to join in as well, her own voice just as soft she sings, “marry me, if ever get the nerve to say ‘hello’ in this cafe.”

 

**November 6th 2010**

“We should jump on the bed,” Skye suggests as soon as they get their hotel room.

“Are you insane,” Jemma asks, but Skye just grins at her like a fool.

“You married me, so if anybody’s insane, it’s definitely you,” Skye tells her, already kicking off her heels and letting out a sigh of relief when her feet hit the plush carpet for the first time in what feels like forever.

“Is that so?”

“It is,” she replies as she hops up on top of the bed and says, “now Jemma Simmons, my dear wife, join me upon this bed, as we bounce like small children on our honeymoon.”

“When you put it like that, how can I refuse?”

“You can’t,” she informs her, taking an experimental bounce and finding that the bed definitely supports her weight without any problem.

Jemma just shakes her head at Skye, before reaching down to unstrap her own heels. They come off with a bit more difficulty than Skye’s had, but it’s not too long before Jemma joins her up on the bed.

She stands awkwardly like she’s unsure of what to do now, adjusting her dress with every other motion, and it suddenly dawns on Skye.

“You’ve never jumped on a bed before, have you?”

Jemma shakes her head once, strands of hair escaping her elegantly pinned updo; a small flush rising up the side of her neck that she nerves rubs at.

“That’s adorable,” Skye teases her, “you’re adorable.”

“Oh shush you,” Jemma waves her hands at her, “I’m a good girl, no breaking the rules, no staying up late, and no jumping on bed-”

“So you figured the best place to start would be committing a felony,” Skye arches an eyebrow with her, almost disbelievingly.

“No - I, well I just,” Jemma starts to ramble, her cheeks coloring even more as she finds herself unable to come up with an appropriate excuse. “I thought you wanted to jump on the bed not interrogate me?”

“I did,” Skye says, she takes another experimental jump on the bed, watching with thinly veiled amusement, when Jemma wobbles a bit, standing on her tiptoes and then descending, as if that was a jump.

She’s completely hopeless and Skye gives in, holding out her hands and says, “here grab onto me.” When Jemma does as she asks, Skye takes another jump up, this time bringing Jemma with her.

The other woman lets out a little squeak, but a moment later she smiles, “that wasn’t so bad.”

“I told you,” Skye smiles, “now jump with me, because we just got married and as per tradition, we must break this bed in!”

Jemma thankfully doesn’t have to be told twice.

 

**November 6th 2010**

It’s when the sun finally rises on the morning that Skye finds herself trapped in place, because this isn’t the first time she has woken up in a hotel bed with Jemma curled up beside her, but it’s the first time that Skye has done so while wearing a wedding right.

Jemma stirs next to her, how Skye was able to wake up before her anyways was nothing short of a miracle, but Jemma is most certainly awake now, smiling at her, looking a complete mess with bed head and smudged makeup, but looking so beautiful at the same time that Skye’s a bit breathless.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Jemma says.

“Good morning to you too.”

“We should probably get out of bed, we’ve got a busy day if we want to accomplish everything on our itinerary,” Jemma says, already rolling over and preparing to get out of the bed.

Skye grumbles and buries herself back in the blankets, “I was thinking we could just sleep for the whole weekend.”

Jemma rolls her eyes, before pulling herself out of the bed and heading towards the bathroom, “how about I shower first, that way you can have an extra ten minutes of sleep.”

“I need like ten hours,” Skye mumbles, but it’s all in jest and Jemma surely knows that.

Skye doesn’t get any extra sleep; she doesn’t really think that she could anyways. It’s not excitement for the rest of their preplanned day that has her wired so early in the morning, but the thought of getting to spend the whole weekend with Jemma without any interruptions is certainly enough to make her heart soar.

Maybe she could even find some excuse to kiss her again, because as Skye laid there she was certain she still felt the ghost of all those kisses they had exchanged at the wedding on her lips, and she _needed_ to feel that again - to check that those fireworks were real, not just a figment of her imagination.

More importantly though she needed to figure out if Jemma felt the same way, because surely Skye couldn’t be the only one that had felt that rush, right?

 

**November 7th 2010**

She texts the guys sometime around noon when they’re walking along the beach, because apparently even though it had been snowing back home, there were still some parts of the country that had an infinite summer, her fingers fly across the keys when Jemma is too busy taking in the sights and she asks one question: _I know this is a fake marriage, but do we have to do the whole consummation thing?_

She doesn’t get a reply until an hour later when they’re sipping on drinks with mini umbrella’s and her phone lights up with three texts coming all in at once and an audio clip.

Against her better judgment she opens the audio clip first, only to be greeted with a clip of Fitz dying of laughter.

“Do I even want to know,” Jemma asks, craning her head to take a glance as Skye’s phone, but she pulls it back to her chest before she can, suddenly self-conscious of what she had asked the guys.

“Just Fitz and Ward being asses,” Skye says, opening the text messages they had sent, her slightly annoyed grimace only becoming stronger as she stares at the phone.

 _Use protection_ , was the first text sent before, Fitz corrected himself and said _wait, girls don’t need protection! lol!_

Ward’s text was more to the point and clearly intended as a joke, _sorry for the delay in replying, we were consummating our marriage._

She types back _remind me to never ask you guys for anything again_ , before she closes her phone and stuffs it back into her pocket.

 

**November 9th 2010**

When she goes back to work on Tuesday morning the first thing she does is punch Ward in the arm, hard enough that she hopes he remembers not to be a jerk next time. She’s certain that it won’t work, but it makes her feel a bit better about everything.

The second thing she does is run into her boss, literally. In Skye’s defense a certain lumbering idiot had been distracting her, but that doesn’t make it any better when she physically bumps into the person who is responsible for signing her paycheck.

Luckily he hadn’t been holding coffee or anything at the time, but that’s a small relief.

She aims for casual when she apologizes, “sorry about that, I’ve been a bit distracted,” she says in her defense.

“You’re all good,” Coulson replies, “I was actually hoping to speak to you.”

“I’m not get fired, am I,” Skye says, panic seizing her, because she could probably have seen this coming, it’s not like Skye has the best track record when it comes to keeping a job for any lengthy period of time.

“No, no, why would you think that,” he asks, before shaking his head once more, as if the notion of her losing her job was so farfetched that he can’t even understand her worry. Skye takes a small piece of mind from that. “Nevermind, would you mind walking with me, unless Mr. Ward has a pressing computer problem that he needs you for?”

“She’s all yours,” Ward offers her up all too quickly.

Somebody needed to teach that guy the rules of being a good friend, but seeing as his only friends seem to be her, Fitz and Jemma, the odd’s weren’t exactly in any of their favors.

Coulson inclines his head towards his office and Skye follows along behind him. With any luck it would be that he had a computer problem, something that Skye knew how to deal with easily, nothing too challenging or serious.

Though when they enter his office and he tells her to take a seat, rather than talking about his computer, she knows that her hopes had fallen short.

“Don’t be so tense,” he tries to reassure her, “you’re not in trouble.”

Skye lets out a sigh of relief at that, “sorry, I’m just. This wouldn’t be the first time and I did miss work Monday and Friday-”

“I gave you the days off, it’s not every day you get married,” Coulson reminds her.

She was sure if he knew the truth about her whole wedding mess he would think the exact opposite.

“I guess so,” Skye agrees, shifting back in the seat to get more relaxed.

“I was actually wondering, what your plans for Thanksgiving were?”

Oh, that made a lot more sense, she supposed.  

For some reason the fact that the holiday was coming up had completely slipped Skye’s mind. Probably because she had never celebrated it much before, growing up in various foster homes meant that if she had had a handful of different experiences with the holiday, none of which were particularly memorable or exciting.

“I can work, Jemma and I don’t have any plans, so it’s not a problem,” she reassures him.

“No that’s - you don’t have any plans?”

Skye shook her head once more, suddenly feeling the need to explain, “Jemma’s British, so I don’t think she even has a clue what Thanksgiving is.”

“What about your family?”

She grimaces, somehow conversations about holidays always come around to something like this, and she has to find some way to say, “my parents are dead,” without sounding too bitter about it.

She’s not entirely certain that she managed to pull it off right, not when her boss’ face suddenly shifts into a sad one.

“Would you like to have plans?”

“Excuse me?”

“Ah, that came out wrong,” Coulson seems to realize, “what I mean is, if you two would like, you could join my wife and I for Thanksgiving. Audrey always makes too much turkey and we end up eating it through all of December, with you two as well we might be able to eat enough down that I am saved from the turkey torture by the end of Hanukkah.”

She only hesitates for a moment before saying, “that would be lovely.”

 

**November 25th 2010**

“You weren’t kidding about the turkey,” Skye informs him as she takes one long look at the dinner table, which is currently heaped with food, the centerpiece of which is a giant roast turkey. There’s even more food being added to the table, moments later Jemma, having insisted upon helping Audrey bring everything in, smiles at Skye when she sets a platter of rolls on the table. “I’m going to go into a food coma from all of this.”

“What she means to say is thank you for inviting us,” Jemma corrects her, her fingers brushing along Skye’s back as she disappears back into the kitchen.

For somebody who hadn’t even know that Thanksgiving was a real thing until days before, Jemma had launched herself head first into the spirit of the event. After begging Skye to get Coulson’s wife’s phone number the two women has apparently spent hours talking about anything and everything related to Thanksgiving and were on good enough terms that when they had walked through the door earlier, Audrey had quickly pulled Jemma into a hug before stealing her off to the kitchen to help finish some things up.

Audrey comes in next setting down cranberry sauce and quickly instructs them both to sit down instead of standing about taking up space.

“They’re getting along well,” Coulson says, gesturing to the two women talking happily in the kitchen.

“I think it has something to do with being a control freak,” Skye says, before realizing she had just insulted her boss’ wife and correcting, “no offense meant.”

“None taken,” he replies laughing, “so how is it being a newlywed?”

“Oh you know,” Skye replies vaguely, “kind of the same. I mean, we were already living together so.”

“You’ve already broken the whole house in?”

She can tell he’s joking with her and she supposes that means she can joke back so she replies, “oh, of course,” with a little laugh.

“Good good,” he replies, “you girls just hold onto that honeymoon phase as long as you can, you’ll miss it later.”

She’s not sure how to say that she already misses it.

Everything leading up to the wedding had been so fast paced, she and Jemma had spent nearly every minute of their spare time together making plans and preparing for the big day. Now that it happened - now that they had returned from their honeymoon things seemed to have slowed down. Jemma was more busy with work, and Skye technically was too, but she missed their movie nights and flipping through wedding magazines on their couch together.

She doesn’t get a chance to reply, because Jemma and Audrey had both returned this time with the last of the plates and it’s time for dinner to begin. But when they hold hands to say grace, she squeezes Jemma’s hand as if that’s enough.

 

**December 25th 2010**

It’s snowing outside, the first white Christmas that Skye has had in years, she presses her fingers against the window pane, watching the snowflakes flutter down on the city below her. Normally this time of year she would have hated it when it snowed, but now the whole notion seemed incredibly romantic and incredibly perfect.

As she watched the snow fall outside Skye knew one thing for certain, she was going to kiss Jemma as the snowflakes fluttered around her.

She dresses in a pair of festive pajamas that Jemma had bought for her and emerges from her bedroom only to be greeted with the smell of coffee already being made. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world that Jemma was an early riser.

“You’re using the mug I got you,” Skye hums in delight when she sees that Jemma is putting her birthday gift to good use.

“I’ve used it before.”

“But this is Christmas, it’s different,” she insists, not sure if her logic makes any sense, she’s never been known to be particularly logical before her first cup of coffee, “it’s a special occasion.”

“It’s our first Christmas together,” Jemma agrees, “I guess that does make it special.”

“I knew you could see things my way,” Skye smirks, “speaking of seeing things my way-”

“We’re not leaving this house until it stops snowing,” Jemma cuts her off, clearly already knowing where this is going.

Skye groans, “you and Ward should have gotten married, you’re both snow hating spoilsports.”

“That so?”

“Mhmm,” she nods, “Ward wouldn’t go out during Stormaggedon-”

“Storma-what?”

“-and now you won’t let me fulfill my lifelong dream of kissing somebody in the snow on Christmas day.”

It seems so easy to say, but there’s a beat of silence afterwards where Skye begins to regret her words, until she looks up at Jemma and the other woman is giving her one of those little fond smiles that Skye knows so well.

“In that case, we have to. I mean, I couldn’t let you live an unaccomplished life.”

“Are you serious,” Skye asks, but Jemma has already set her coffee mug down on the table and is pulling her poufy black snow jacket off on the coat rack, “we’re still in our pajamas?”

“Just grab your coat,” Jemma tells her, moving to slip her feet into snow boots with sudden haste.

Skye has a hard time believing her luck, seeing normally prim and proper Jemma Simmons, bundling up to go out in the snow and kiss her, but Skye quickly shrugs on her jacket all the same as her heart thunders against her ribcage.

The race down the stairs to get to the first floor, her house key jingling in its chain around her neck as she takes the steps two and a time, until they’ve finally managed to get out of the apartment and are standing half-dressed in overstuffed jacket’s on the sidewalk outside their apartment while the snow comes down around them.

And she was right; it was just as romantic as she had imagined it.

Especially when it is Jemma who leans in this time, grabbing onto Skye’s jacket and pulls her in for a kiss.

 

**December 26th 2010**

They had exchanged gifts the night before, after coming back from dinner and drinks with the guys; it had been a quick little affair.

Jemma gave Skye a pair of what looked like hand-knitted mittens and a matching scarf, because apparently on top of being a genius scientist and one of the most amazing people in the world Jemma could also knit.

Skye had given her a mixtape, well technically a mix cd, which Jemma had promised to listen to in the morning.

Even since then Skye had been waiting with mildly suppressed glee for when Jemma would finally put it on, seeing as she was an early bird, Skye had even set an early alarm that way she could be up and out in the living room in time to catch Jemma’s reaction to the music.

The tune of the first song began to play, and Skye does her best to try to keep as straight of a face as she could while typing at her laptop, when Jemma says, “Oh, its Dancing Queen! I knew you didn’t hate this song!”

Skye makes a noncommittal noise, that becomes a choked laugh when the second song comes on and confused Jemma asks, “is this Dancing Queen again,” before saying, “oh, the cd player must have messed up.”

It’s only when the third song comes on and it’s once again that very same song that her wife tosses a pillow at Skye and says, “you did _not_ make a mixtape with the same song over and over again.”

“I thought you loved Dancing Queen?”

“I did!”

 

**December 29th 2010**

“God, Fitz, you’re so old,” Skye tells him, because saying Happy Birthday seems so cliché.

“Says the literal baby of the group,” he retorts.

“I may be the baby, but at least I’m cute,” she teases, “you’re all old and awful and wrinkly.”

They’re out at some bar for Fitz’s birthday.

The bartender is a friend of Ward’s and lets them order their drinks without being carded, something Skye is very grateful for. She’s been out with these three enough times as the only sober one of the group to know that it’s not any fun, and even while both Jemma and Fitz seemed to have obscenely high alcohol tolerances they still could get tipsy when they wanted to.

She takes a sip of her drink and looks around the bar, trying to find where her wife has gotten off to, she had gotten up from their group to go to the bathroom a while ago, and should have been back by now, by Skye’s reckoning.

“Looking for somebody,” Ward says, catching Skye searching about.

“Just trying to figure out where Jemma’s gotten off to.”

“She’s on your eight,” he says, and she follows his directions to find the other woman.

She’s standing up against a wall, talking to some guy that she’s never seen before, and without warning Skye feels a flare up of jealousy inside of her. The guy puts a hand on Jemma’s shoulder and she doesn’t even bother to brush it away, just laughs and sort of leans forward into him. Never before had Skye seen Jemma show any interest in a guy, other than remarking on a few celebrities having nice asses. However, now Jemma is showing exactly what Skye would have categorized as interest, had they been any two other people in the world doing the exact same thing Skye would have thought that they were flirting.

Now though the idea of Jemma flirting with somebody that wasn’t her made Skye feel sick.

It felt like she was being cheated on, which technically they were married so if Jemma was flirting with somebody else that was exactly what it was. At the same time, a voice in the back of Skye’s head that sounded far too much like Ward reminded her that this wasn’t a marriage, not really, but a business transaction.

“How long have they been talking,” Skye manages to finally get out of her tight throat, voice hoarse as she asks the question.

“Two songs,” Ward answers, as a measurement of the time, and yeah, Skye definitely feels sick now.

“I have to go,” she says abruptly getting out of the seat, but the motion causes her to knock her drink off the counter onto the floor.

Some part of that must catch Jemma’s attention, because when Skye looks back at where she was standing Jemma meets her eyes, confusion knitting her brows together.

 _What’s wrong_ , she sees Jemma mouth, but Skye just shakes her head, grabbing her jacket off the back of the chair and heading for the door.

It’s not until she’s out in the cold night air, with snowflakes falling around her that she realizes she’s actually wearing Jemma’s coat and not her own. It’s that awful overstuffed black one with a hood big enough to hide in, so she pulls it up as if she could bury herself in the hood and forget everything she had seen back in the bar.

There’s a familiar click of heels behind her, but Skye doesn’t turn around, not even when Jemma calls her name. Though she does slow her pace slightly, just enough that Jemma is able to catch up with her a moment later.

Her cheeks are pink from a mix of exertion and the cold, and she still has that hopelessly confused look on her face. It would normally look cute and bring a smile to Skye’s face if she wasn’t feeling so hopelessly messed up on the inside.

“I was calling you,” Jemma finally says after a moment, when they’re standing side by side now.

“I know.”

“Then why didn’t you-”

“You were flirting with that guy in there-”

“You mean Tripp? Oh Skye, no we work together-”

“So you lean all over all of your coworkers-”

“It’s not, I wasn’t-”

“I know what I saw,” she says sharper, angrier, “you were flirting with some guy I’ve never heard of before in a bar, and I mean, I guess that’s fine. We’re only fake married anyways, but it’s still, you shouldn’t do that. What if somebody saw?”

Skye’s angry, which is why she doesn’t care when she sees Jemma’s facial expression flick from one of worried compassion to one of anger as well. Later she’ll dwell on that expression, on which words it were that flicked the switch that made Jemma stop caring, that ruined things before they could even properly start. But on that fateful night as the snow whirled around them, standing outside of the bar, she didn’t care.

“That’s all you - wow, just wow - You’re unbelievable,” is all Jemma says, voice cold, before she whips back around and storms back the way she had come, going back into the bar and leaving Skye standing there in the cold.

 

**December 31st 2010**

It’s been two days since they had fought and they had spent the both days avoiding each other around the apartment, each far too proud to admit that they’re at fault for what happened. As far as Skye was concerned she hadn’t done anything wrong, Jemma was the one off flirting with whomever the hell that was, while Skye had been sitting there with the guys. Of course, Jemma didn’t see it that way, not if the way she kept frowning and Skye whenever they were in the same room was any indication.

Now though, they’re out in public at the same New Year’s party that she had attended the year prior with Fitz and Ward. It was at the apartment of friend of theirs that Skye had meet when she was pretty well on her way to drunk last year and couldn’t remember for the life of her. Though for some reason she kept thinking of Pride and Prejudice whenever she tried to remember the person’s name, which probably wasn’t a very good indicator.

Her and Jemma had never been the public couple, the casual touches that Fitz and Ward seemed to have down naturally just couldn’t seem to come easy to Skye at all, but now she finds herself putting extra purpose into them, leaning on Jemma like everything is perfectly fine like they’re super happy and in love.

Even if they can both see the cracks it doesn’t mean that everybody else should have to be subjected to their mess of a relationship.

Jemma, for her part, seems more than fine to play it up as well. Her hand currently rests across Skye’s knee drawing small circles into her skin that would have been soothing on any other day, but now leaves her restless.

“You two are the most awkward looking people I have ever seen,” Ward informs them, as he chooses to sit on the other side of the couch.

“Thank you,” Skye says sharply.

“Still fighting.”

She says, “no,” and the same time Jemma says, “yes.”

“At least I know one of you can be honest,” Ward remarks, nonplussed when Skye flips him off, “don’t worry in about ten minutes you’ll be forced to kiss it out and make things better.”

“What, why,” Skye asks.

“New Year’s,” he supplies.

Somehow it had slipped her mind that normal people, normal couples, kissed when the clock struck midnight like it was a sacred thing. She’d only kissed one other person on New Year’s before, back when she was seventeen and had been living with Miles. Back then the whole notion hadn’t pleased her and now the feeling certainly seemed to remain the same.

“Oh right.”

“So that gives you, a little under ten minutes to make up before it all comes out,” Ward says, pushing himself up off of the couch and wishing them both, “good luck,” before disappearing.

“He really came over here just to say that, didn’t he,” Skye says, but Jemma doesn’t respond.

Apparently making up was going to be a lot harder than she had planned, not that Skye had planned on making up until Jemma apologize, but since that clearly wasn’t going to happen she had to try something else.

She waits another minute, before the silence starts to get to her and Skye _has_ to say something to make it go away.

She takes a deep breath, before adopting the worst attempt at a British accent that she can manage and replying to her own question, “why yes, Skye dearest, it would see you’re right.”

Jemma doesn’t obviously budge, but the fingers that had been making lazy circles on her leg still.

“I usually am,” she responds in her own voice, “though sometimes I fuck up.”

“Sometimes we both fuck up,” Skye uses the fake-Jemma voice to respond to herself again.

This time Jemma does react, “I don’t curse.”

“My mistake,” Skye says, before correcting herself using her fake-Jemma voice, “pardon my French, oh ho ho, I’m so silly sometimes, as you can see I too make mistakes.”

Jemma snorts, before responding to Skye in an absolutely flawless American accent, “I’m not sure if I can see it. See I am _incredibly_ stubborn.”

“Well, Skye, maybe you should work on that,” Skye says, finding that she quite enjoys their game, and while their way of resolving things might not be the most convention, she thinks the sly smile Jemma is trying to hide is an indication that we’re on the right track, “maybe you shouldn’t be so hasty to judge people, even if I was totally flirting with Mr. What’s-His-Face.”

“Well, maybe I,” she stops catching herself, keeping up the accent, “maybe you should be more understanding. I’m just trying to keep our secrets safe because I don’t want to go to jail for committing a felony.”

“I don’t particularly fancy getting deported.”

“I don’t fancy you getting deported either,” Jemma says, “but I - you - no, I,” she flounders unsure of who she’s supposed to be speaking about now. “We need to communicate better, that’s the bottom line. So I, Skye, am very sorry.”

“I, _Doctor_ Jemma Simmons, am also very sorry,” Skye answers her.

And even though it still feels sort of like a joke, it also feels like they’re doing things right.

“That’s it then, our first fight resolved,” Skye continues, her Jemma-voice ending on a questioning note.

“Second fight,” Jemma insists with an American accent.

“Second?”

“Our first was about you - me,” Jemma huffs, “the Facebook thing.”

Whatever self-control Skye had was lost in that moment, the laughter that she had been holding off since Jemma showed off her American accent, finally bubbles over and escapes and Jemma is laughing along with her a moment later.

Somewhere in the background the crowd starts the countdown, but she isn’t paying attention.

Not until Jemma calms down enough to count down the last few numbers still in her fake accent, and Skye joins in.

When midnight hits and the countdown ends they do kiss, it’s nothing like the times before, there’s no passion, no butterflies, and when she pulls back she almost feels a bit silly.

“Skye,” Jemma says, finding her own voice for the first time in a while, “You’re my best friend, you know that right? No matter what we’ll always be friends.”

“You’re mine too.”

**January 19th 2011**

She tugs her scarf tighter around her neck in an attempt to keep the heat trapped in, it doesn’t work, and she curses the Boston weather as she hurried to the Hub in order to grab a quick cup of coffee and try to warm herself up before heading into work. Skye is so intent on getting her coffee that she isn’t looking where she’s going and when so walking into somebody seems like something she should have seen coming.

“Sorry, sorry,” Skye says quickly, ready to continue apologizing only to stop when the person she bumping into speaks up.

“Skye?”

That certainly gets her attention, out of all the people in the whole city that she could have accidently bumped into it would have to be one of the people she had been desperately trying to avoid for the past few months.

“Miles.”

“Missed you too,” he replies, not lacking his usual arrogance, smug smile on his face, his hands still on her shoulders holding her in place.

Skye wiggles a bit to free herself from his grasp and narrows her eyes at him, “you need to stop sending viruses to my computer.”

“The last one was a wedding gift,” he doesn’t even try to deny this actions, “I would have gotten you something better, but for some reason you forgot to invite your oldest friend to the ceremony.”

“That was intentional.”

“I get it,” he grins at her, “old flame and new flame, not exactly a good combination. Plus with me in the room, it’s liable that you wouldn’t have been able to walk down the aisle, I mean - I know I’m good and you always have a way of coming back.”

“Not this time.”

“You willing to bet money on that, Skye?”

She wants to tell him that she would, she wants to tell him to fuck off, but given everything, she finds herself saying, “no,” in a voice that quiet enough that only he hears her.

Later that night she spends a good twenty minutes trying to wash the phone number written in permanent marker off her arm pretending that she didn’t have it memorized.

 

**February 14th 2011**

They spend their first real Valentine’s Day in their apartment with a dog taking up most of their couch space.

“You’re lucky we like your owners,” Skye says, petting Buddy as she talks, “or well we like you, your owners are sons of bitches. Though technically I suppose you are too.”

“Skye,” Jemma says in her little warning tone.

“It’s not like the dog can understand me,” she says to her defense, “he just like the attention. Also not unlike his owners.”

Ward had called her up two days prior, all but begging her to watch Buddy for the weekend, at the time Skye hadn’t even been thinking about why the guys would need a few days off and had accepted far too easily.

It was only an hour later when the guys showed up with the dog and a bag full of foods and treats for him that it had clicked in her brain.

“I don’t even understand why they couldn’t just leave you at home,” Skye coos, “it’s not like you’d make a mess of the apartment.”

“Fitz said they were going out of town,” Jemma supplies.

“Oh right, on their romantic Valentine’s vacation,” she remarks sarcastically, “last time I checked, Fitz and Ward were as fake as our relationship was, they don’t need to make a show out of the holiday.”

“I guess, some people just like to pretend that they’re normal.”

Skye snorts at that, missing the double meaning in Jemma’s words and says, “Fitz and Ward are the exact opposite of normal.”

 

**March 13th 2011**

The second time she gets invited out for dinner with the Simmons’ Skye is prepared for it. Jemma had insisted that this would be a much simpler affair than last time, selected the Cheesecake Factory of all places as the location, as if choosing a normal chain restaurant over some ritzy place where they don’t even put the prices on the menus would make her feel better.

A small bit of relief comes to her when Jemma informs her that Fitz and Ward will be joining them for dinner as well, since apparently Jemma’s parents are good friends with Fitz’s mother and were instructed to give him her best wishes.

That relief only lasts until the guys arrive.

The first few minutes without them pass well enough; Jemma is pulled into hugs by both of her parents who express repeatedly how much they miss her and how it’s so sad that she can’t visit London until she’s officially a citizen of the United States without jeopardizing her chances. They smile at Skye politely enough, Jemma’s mother doesn’t do more than that, but her father is slightly more open and gives Skye a firm handshake.

Given the circumstances she feels a bit like that’s their way of showing approval, until Fitz and Ward arrives.

At the sight of them, or well at the sight of Fitz since they are rather keen on ignoring Ward’s existence, Jemma’s mother lights up and pulls Fitz into a very open hug, before pressing a kiss into his curls, like he’s her own son.

Jemma’s father doesn’t give Fitz a handshake like the one he had given Skye, but rather some weirdly British bro hug.

And somehow the night turns into a FitzSimmons affair, as Jemma’s mother so quickly dubs them and most of the conversations at their table are spoken by people without any trace of an American accent.

Ward doesn’t seem to be bothered by any of this. She envies his composure, because her own hands shake as she tries to stay focused on her menu, too distracted by the talk of science that is so clearly over her head.

It’s so awkward that as soon as she’s ordered she excuses herself to the bathroom. Of course, even then she can’t seem to escape them, because Mrs. Simmons seems to think that’s a wonderful idea as well.

Skye doesn’t even bother trying for awkward conversation, instead elects to keep to dead silence, unless pressed.

What she doesn’t expect is that Mrs. Simmons will be the one to bring the awkward conversation, when as they’re washing their hands, she smiles at Skye and says, “it’s really great what you and that Ward boy are doing for our dear Jemma and Leo. I’m sure when they finally end up together they’ll thank you in the wedding speeches.”

 

**March 14th 2011**

“Have you ever worried that Jemma and Fitz might be using us so they can get together?”

“Oh they're certainly using us,” Ward agrees, “but not for that reason.”

“How can you be so sure,” she asks desperately, not wanting to clue him into the reason why she can’t stop thinking about this, why she can’t sleep at night for fear of the thoughts running through her head.

“I just am.”

 

**April 9th 2011**

“You sure we can’t go to Vegas? It’s going to be _my_ birthday, the being twenty-one,” Skye whines, slumping forward into Ward during their lunch break.

He’s as tense as a rock and currently making a pretty terrible pillow, “ _you_ can go, but I’m not coming.”

“It won’t be a party unless all of my friends are there,” Skye insists, which is partially true, the other part might come from the fact that she absolutely refuses to be the third wheel in the ‘FitzSimmons’ shenanigans on her birthday. “I don’t see what the big deal is, isn’t just Vegas?”

“Exactly.”

“Didn’t you a Fitz run away to Vegas and get married, anyways? Logically going back should bring back fond memories of that day,” she teases.

She’s not prepared for the way Ward jerks back abruptly at her words as though he’d been hit. “You don’t-” he starts then stops, shaking his head, “no, Skye, just no.”

There’s a story to that and she intends to ask about it, but the way he seems to have completely shut down is enough to get Skye to back off for the time being. She spends a good minute quietly picking at her salad before she says, “what about that bar on fifth street?”

 

**April 19th 2011**

Tuesday is the absolute worst day to have a birthday, mostly because with each drink she takes Skye becomes more and more aware of the fact that somehow she has to stumble into work tomorrow morning and pretend that she doesn’t have a hangover.

Had it been any other birthday Skye might have thought of restraining herself, but it was her twenty-first and since Ward had vetoed the Vegas trip she was at least going to find a way to enjoy herself here in Boston.

Which at this point had involved getting so far gone that she could hardly even remember her own name.

And maybe she’s drunk, maybe she’s more than drunk, maybe all the colors have started to blend together, but there’s a warm bubbly feeling growing in her stomach that makes her so happy that she doesn’t even care.

Any and all inhibitions that Skye might have had had flown out the window four shots ago, in the background that god awful Ke$ha song plays, but Skye feels like it’s her anthem. Right about now every song could be her anthem.

“This place about to blow,” she shouts out loud to match the lyrics, though it’s more like shouting that actually singing.

She staggers steps to the side a bit, very much thankful when a pair of hands comes out of seemingly nowhere to steady her. She slurs out something that she hopes sounds like, “thanks,” as she turns to see who her savior is.

Finding that it’s Jemma staring back at her makes things even better, as long as Skye ignores the worried expression that has her knitting her brows together.

“You should smile,” Skye says, her tipsy mind getting the better of her, “you’re so pretty when you smile.”

Jemma makes a small smile at her words, but it’s not what Skye wanted at all.

“You’re so pretty, so pretty,” she continues, her own hands find their way onto Jemma’s cheeks, pinching at her cheeks in an attempt to get her to smile.

When that doesn’t succeed she does the only thing her tipsy mind can think off, rocks forward on her toes and kisses Jemma. Skye isn’t thinking about how their last kiss was months ago on New Year’s, she isn’t thinking about any of that, she’s only thinking about how the best gift she could ever get is to kiss Jemma and have her return the kiss.

As it is, that’s one gift she isn’t receiving.

The second their lips touched Jemma seemed to turn to stone in her hands, not budging an inch, and when Skye pulls back ready to demand an expression she only sees a disappointed look.

“You’re drunk,” Jemma says bluntly.

Those will be the only words she remembers in the morning, when she wakes up hungover and still in her dress from the night before. She will remember how unhappy Jemma had looked as she said those words, will replay them in her head for weeks following.

Somehow she will have forgotten the words Jemma says next, “if you really want this, then kiss me when you’re sober.”

 

**April 24th 2011**

“Happy Easter,” Skye announces with glee before presenting Jemma with a giant chocolate rabbit.

The other woman who had spent most of the day laying on the couch with a hot press moaning about how much she hates Mother Nature, lights up at the sight of the chocolate treat and says, “my hero,” but her tone is not as slight as it usually is when she adorns Skye with that term of affection and Skye knows it’s not just the period that’s changed her tune.  

 

**May 7th 2011**

The first Friday she goes out its work friends inviting her out, because she’s officially twenty-one and can go out partying if she wants to. The first time she invites Jemma along with, only to be shut down, the other woman insisting that she had paperwork to do for work.

After the second time she turns her down, Skye just stops asking.

In hindsight that was an awful idea, but at the time it had made sense in her head, so that night, after so many others like it, she hadn’t even thought to mention to Jemma where she was going. She had just slipped on one of the skimpiest dresses she owned and found her way down to the bar where the fun happened.

It’s around 2am when she finally manages to stumble home, having lost one of her heels along the way. She feels tipsy and all of the edges around her are starting to blur together to the point where it takes her four tries to get her key in the door and open it up.

Skye had expected the apartment to be dark, and for a second was thrown off guard when she realized that there was still a light on. Though seeing Jemma sitting at the table working on something was the obvious explanation.

“You’re up late,” Skye points out the obvious.

The speed in which Jemma’s head snaps up should probably put in a record book, her tone is just as snappy when she asks, “where have you been?”

“Uh, out?”

“You didn’t think to tell me.”

“You’ve been busy with that work thing,” Skye says gesturing to the books that are all over the table, “the science that I don’t understand.”

Jemma pinches the bridge of her nose and says, “you could have told me you were going out.”

“What were you worried,” she replies back mockingly.

“As a matter of fact I was. I tried calling you and when you didn’t pick up, I had to assume the worst. I’ve been waiting up all night to hear for you,” Jemma says, “you should have said something, instead of just going out for the night like some reckless teenager.”

That was a low blow, one that Skye wasn’t going to forgive easily.

“You know,” Skye says sharply, “last time I checked you were my wife, not my mother.”

“I just worry-”

“And my fake wife at that,” she cuts her off, “so what does it even matter?”

There’s a silence that hangs in the air for a good minute before Jemma stands up from her seat on the couch, gather’s up her laptop and books. She looks Skye over once more, but her expression is cold and shuttered when she says, “I guess it doesn’t matter. My mistake for caring,” before walking out the room without waiting for a response.

 

**May 13th 2011**

The next time she comes stumbling in from a night out on the town Jemma’s not waiting for her.

Skye tries not to think about why that makes her feel disappointed.

 

**May 20th 2011**

She starts going out on weekdays as well as the weekends, stops caring about Jemma’s disapproving looks, because it’s her life and Skye reckons that she can do what she wants. She doesn’t need some twenty-five year old _doctor_ telling her how to run the show.

What she needs is somebody who can have fun, which is why two drinks into the night she ends up making what is probably a terrible decision and calling a number that she had tried to convince herself she didn’t have memorized.

He picks up after the second ring, and Skye says, “meet me at the bar on fifth in thirty minutes,” before hanging up the phone.

She orders another drink while she waits and tries to think about whether he will actually show up or not. Knowing him she would usually say no, however, knowing how much he fancied her, she expected him to show up right on time.

Miles, never one to live up to her expectations shows up five minutes late, “fashionably late,” as he’ll insist when she makes a less than subtle dig about it.

“Missed you too,” he says greeting her and sliding up to sit on the barstool next to her, “you know I didn’t think you’d call.”

“I didn’t think you’d show,” she says, alluding to his obvious lateness, but Miles just grins back at her.

“You know me. I’ve been waiting by the phone for the moment you realized being a lesbian was a shit decision,” Miles replies all cocky and cool.

“I haven’t missed you in the slightest,” she informs him.

“Says the woman who calls me up out of the blue to come down to a bar when she’s not even wearing her wedding ring.”

“You don’t even know the half of it?”

“I don’t,” he agrees, “but I’m dying to know.”

Three drinks later after having said far too more than she ought to, she finds herself kissing that smug smile off his face, while closing her eyes and pretending that he’s somebody completely different, somebody that she’s actually been missing.

It doesn’t quite work, but it also doesn’t stop her from trying again the next night she goes out.

 

**May 27th 2011**

She nearly falls asleep at work, only jolting back to reality at the sound of a bottle of Advil being spammed onto her desk.

“What the hell,” she starts to ask; only to look up and meet what she is relatively certain is Ward’s concerned face.

“This is me not judging and not caring,” he explains, “just offering to help in whatever way I can.”

And with that cryptic message he leaves her cubicle just as suddenly as he had arrived.

 

**June 2nd 2011**

Her back collides with the frame of his door, which would normally be enough to snap her out of her drunken haze, but his hands are brushing up against her thighs lifting her higher and Skye hadn’t realized just how much she needed this until then. She gasps against his lips before grinding her hips forward against his.

“Somebody’s needy,” he teases.

“Fuck you,” she hisses back at him, “and I swear to go if you say ‘missed you too’ with that smug little smirk I’m going to cut your dick off.”

“You think I’ve smug,” he chuckles almost fondly.

“I think you’re moving too slowly,” Skye says instead, her finger darting for the buttons of his pants so that she can tug them down around his legs.

“Bed, let’s go to the bed,” Miles insists, as though it’s a struggle to say it.

Skye complies, tugging him back through the all too familiar apartment to where she knows his bedroom is, and finishing what she came here to do.

It’s a relief that she has so desperately needed over the last year, a release that for a brief moment helps ease the tension in her shoulders.

That is until reality crashes down around her all at once.

Her post-orgasm haze evaporates just as soon as it had arrived, leaving a bitter taste in her mouth.

“We can’t do this ever again,” Skye says as she’s lying in the bed of Miles’ shitty apartment staring up at his cracked ceiling. “I mean - _fuck_ \- I’m married.”

“Fake married,” he corrects her, and she hates herself for telling him the truth, but she needed to get it off of her chest, needed to share it with somebody who was outside of the situation.

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s not,” Skye informs him, “because even if all that is fake, I still - I still have feelings for her. I think I’m in love with her, and maybe I have been for a while, but I’m afraid to admit it.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m ninety-nine percent certain that Jemma Simmons isn’t in love with me.”

“And what about that other one percent?”

“That would be the reason why this can never happen again.”

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special notes: 
> 
> 1\. Songs featured in this chapter are Marry Me by Train, Dancing Queen (again), and Blow by Ke$ha  
> 2\. There should be other notes here, but I'm sleepy and should be working on my thesis.


	5. Year 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since people were asking about it, you can find me over [here](plinys.tumblr.com) on tumblr ~
> 
> Also a huge thanks to dementage over on tumblr who made [this](http://dementage.tumblr.com/post/88458479881/dedicated-to-plinys-for-the-way-our-horizons) amazing gif set based on the events of the last chapter ~ <3

**June 3rd 2011**

She comes home early that night, long before Jemma has returned home from the university.

It’s a Friday night and last weekend she would have spent it at a bar partying, but now she finds herself sitting on the couch wrapped in yet another one of those quilts Jemma’s mother made, staring at the blank tv screen and trying to think of what to say when she gets there.

Skye’s not sure how long she’s been sitting there when the door opens and Jemma enters, but she can tell that the other woman is surprised from the way that Jemma hesitates in the doorway.

“You’re home early,” Jemma says.

And Skye struggles to find the words before she answers, “yeah, I am.”

There’s something in her tone that betrays her, and Skye hates that she can’t keep her emotions in check, because soon enough Jemma’s leaving the doorway to sit beside her on the other half of their couch, worry in her beautiful eyes and asks, “are you okay?”

She shakes her head once and that’s all it takes for Jemma to cross onto Skye’s half of the couch and pull her into a hug, a hug that she doesn’t even deserve.

If only she knew, she wouldn’t act this way.

If she knew how Skye had acted lately.

If she knew where Skye had been last night.

If Jemma knew the way she felt.

Then she wouldn’t be holding her this tight, whispering into her hair that everything is going to be alright.

“I fucked up,” Skye says, voice tight, trying to hold off the tears that want to spill over.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Jemma just reassures her.

“No, it’s me, I just I can’t do anything right-”

“That’s not true.”

“And you’re-” _the love of my life_ “-my best friend, but I’ve been such a shitty friend, such a shitty _wife._ You deserve so much more and I-”

“I’ve been a shitty wife too,” Jemma admits.

Had it been any other time Skye would have been surprised to have heard Jemma curse, but now with her chest tight, she can only focus on the fact that they’re getting through his.

“We’ve both been awful to each other for a while,” Jemma continues, “and I’m sorry for everything, for nagging you and not communicating and for Fitz’s birthday party.”

“That was back in December.”

“I can still apologize for that,” she says smiling weakly, “I still need to apologize for a lot of things-”

“I slept with Miles,” Skye cuts her off, because it’s not Jemma who needs to apologize, she’s the one that needs to apologize, she’s the one who ruined everything.

“What?”

Skye’s not sure how to describe the look Jemma’s giving her, some sort of confusion and yet a hint of sadness is so clear that Skye feels awful all over again.

“I slept with Miles last night, that’s why I didn’t come home. You might not have noticed that last part-”

“I did.”

“You did?”

“I told you, I worry about you sometimes.”

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Skye, it’s okay.

“No it’s not, because I mean, technically I cheated on you, even though it’s not really, I mean we aren’t-”

“Skye, you’re my friend,” Jemma says, cutting her off, there’s something serious in her face, something that makes Skye want to pay attention to her words, “I never expected you to be anything more than that. If you want to see other people, that’s fine. It would be unreasonable to expect you to remain celibate for the entirety of our fake marriage. Everyone needs to let off steam once in a while, I’m not mad. I’m not mad,” she repeats and Skye wants to believe it, “The truth is we never talk anymore, which I know is partially my fault, we fought back in December and then things got busy with work and we never had a chance to sit down and fix things. I’ve missed having my best friend around; I’ve missed spending time with you like we did before everything happened.”

Friends, that’s right they were friends. She tried to see if she could see anything else in Jemma’s features, any hint of the feelings that had been growing in Skye for months, feelings she had attempted to squash without any success, but she couldn’t be sure.

Maybe it was better this way, to just be friends.

“So you’re not mad or anything?”

“Not at you,” Jemma says, “I’m madder at myself than anything else, and whoever this Miles guy is - I’ll probably pay Ward to punch him in the face if I ever meet him, because nothing should ever make you feel as terrible as you look right now.”

“Ward already punched him for you, back before the wedding and stuff.”

“Good I’ll make him do it again or I might do it myself,” she says, “I’ve got a pretty mean backhand, ask Fitz.”

“I think I might.”

 

**June 4th 2011**

When she wakes up at some point when it’s still dark outside and their long forgotten movie’s credits are playing in the background, she takes comfort in the person  squished against her together creating a mess of limbs and hair and oversized quilts, and she thinks maybe this is the point where things get better.

 

**June 6th 2011**

Skye wakes in the morning to the smell of coffee and the soft hum of somebody singing in the kitchen.

She shrugs on an oversized shirt, before embarking from the comfort of her room to find Jemma sitting at their kitchen table going through notes and folders while the radio plays out the light tune of a normally upbeat and familiar pop song. One of her hands absentmindedly stirs a spoon in her mug of coffee and it warms Skye’s heart when she realizes that she’s using the mug she got for her last birthday.

“Lucky to have been where I have been,” Jemma sings softly as she turns the pages, either not yet having noticed Skye or so caught up in her reading that she daren’t lose her place and look up.

She’s beautiful first thing in the morning and as the sun comes up, light streaming through the windows and catching on Jemma’s hair making it seem like a fiery halo around her face.

How many times had she missed this?

The beautiful image of a morning person in their natural habitat.

How many times had she laid in bed nursing a hangover and thinking about a night of regrets, when she could have been sitting across from Jemma, eating sugary cereal and getting to see this beautiful view first thing every morning?

And Skye realizes as Jemma continues singing along to the lyrics, her voice soft and sweet, and says, “lucky to be coming home someday,” that this is her home, this is where she belong.

When she takes the seat opposite Jemma, stealing the box of overly sugary cereal off the table to pour herself some, and the other woman looks up at her with a smile, she knows it’s all worth it.

 

**June 9th 2010**

“You gave us enough dog food to last five years,”  Skye says, her arms wrapped around the box of pet supplies that Fitz had stuffed into her hands minutes before, “I mean it’s not like we’ve never watched Buddy before.”

“Yes, well, but this is different,” he insists, glancing at Jemma in hopes that she will back her up, but the other woman seems of the same mindset that Skye is, giving Fitz an almost dismissive look as he seems to panic over anything and everything. “Normally Ward drops him off and goes over all of this with you, which obviously can’t happen-”

“Since you’re surprising him with a romantic getaway,” Skye completes.

“It’s not like that,” Fitz says all too quickly, his cheeks slightly flush, “we’re going to his little brother’s college graduation, not doing anything that those eyebrows are implying.”

“My eyebrows aren’t implying anything,” Jemma says, though she wiggles them for emphasis.

“Wait hold on, Ward has a brother? You mean there in some place exists a baby Ward.”

“Yes,” Fitz replies hesitantly almost as if he knows what is coming.

“Do you have a picture of him?”

“Keep in in your pants girl,” Fitz teases, “last time I checked you were married.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m not curious,” Skye says, flashing a grin in Jemma’s direction, “for science.”

“You know Skye makes an excellent point,” Jemma agrees, her smile almost conspiratorial in nature. “You’ll have to send us a picture of them together, for scientific comparison, preferably one in which they’re smiling and looking like dorks. For uh… science.”

“It’s for blackmail isn’t it?”

“Fitz, the idea that you would assume such things of us, poor sweet innocent young women,” Jemma starts, overdramatically.

“Really now?”

“If we admit it, will you give us one anyways?”

 

**June 11th 2011**

They’re in the middle of taking Buddy on his evening walk through the park, when her phone goes off

The very same park when Jemma got down on one knee and proposed to her, which if Skye had been feeling particularly sentimental she might have remarked upon, but she was far too distracted by how Jemma looked with the sinking sun as a backdrop and a dog leash wrapped around her wrist.

Skye digs into the pockets of her shorts to pull out the phone, groaning when she sees its Fitz messaging her, assuming that it will be like his messages have been the last few days, reminding them to walk and feed his dog, as though they could have forgotten about the giant pup that have taken up temporary residence in their apartment. Not to mention the fact that Ward had called them each twice to make sure they were okay with Fitz surprising them with the request and that they had everything they needed.

She was about done with the guys and was more than prepared to text Fitz back telling him exactly that, until she actually opened up the message to realize it was a picture.

The picture was clearly a candid, but featured Ward with a smile that she could honestly say she has never seen on the guy’s features as he talked to what could only be described as a mini-Ward wearing a cap and gown.

“Jem, Jemma, look,” Skye coos, handing the phone off to Jemma and taking Buddy’s leash in return.

“What is it,” Jemma asks, before she finally looks and then, “oh my god, they’re adorable!”

 

**June 24th 2011**

“You’ll never guess what I found at Blockbuster?”

“If its Mamma Mia and you’re going to make fun of me and my love of Dancing Queen again, then you should expect to be sleeping on the couch,” Jemma informs her, a grin on her face that shouldn’t make Skye’s heart thump against her chest as much as it does.

“No, even better,” Skye says, barely containing her glee as she sits on the arm of their couch and tosses the DVD case to Jemma.

Jemma reads the cover of the case, “The Proposal,” before flipping it around to read the backside.

“It’s about this woman who cons the guy she works with into being her green card marriage in exchange for a promotion,” Skye announces with glee, and watches the realization fall across Jemma’s face, “some lady was talking about it at the rental place and I thought of you.”

“You’re awful.”

“I honestly try.”

 

**August 9th 2011**

“You know, I’ve never really had a girl friend before. I mean that like female friend not, fuck buddy kind of way, not that I've really had one of those either,” Skye clarifies when she notices Jemma’s look of confusion, “so I never got to do the typical girl’s night, best friend, things growing up.”

“Me neither,” Jemma confesses, “I sort of skipped a lot of grades and was always the freaky genius kid, so it’s not like anybody would have wanted to be my friend anyways.”

“That’s bullshit, I mean, we deserve all of that silly stuff too,” Skye says huffing, “which is why I was thinking, why don’t we make a list of all the stupid shit we missed out on and turn our movie nights into fulfilling the gap in our hearts caused by not having decent childhood friends?”

Jemma laughs at her choice of wording, and Skye knows that it was pretty absurd, but she had spent the last few days looking up things on the internet trying to find more excuses for to spend time with Jemma and when the idea had hit her it had been too good to pass up.

Even if Jemma didn’t want to have a romantic relationship with her, Skye could at least make sure they had the best damn friendship in the history of the world.

“We already have the sleepover part down,” Jemma points out, “seeing as we live together.”

“Yes, but have we ever made a blanket fort?”

“Pardon?”

“A blanket fort,” Skye repeats, “also known as the greatest thing in the history of blankets and forts.”

“I don’t think that’s-”

“Shush, Jemma, live in the moment,” she says, cutting her off and hopping up from the couch, “now help me gather all the blankets and pillows and cushions in this apartment! We have a fort to make!”

 

**August 10th 2011**

They compare the lists they made over breakfast, Jemma stirring her tea in an almost rhythmic motion, while Skye groans about the fact that they only have plain Cheerios rather than the sugar-coated kind that she had come to love.

They make plans for shopping trips, for nights where they stay in and bake an obscene amount of sweets, for salon days and makeovers, for buying embroidery string in order to learn how to make friendship bracelets.

During her lunch break that day Skye buys a second hand camera to document the entire thing, because she has a feeling that one day she’ll want to look back on these pictures and smile at the stories that they can tell.

 

**August 22nd 2011**

She’s still up working on code when her phone goes off with a text from Jemma, who had supposedly gone to sleep a few hours before. She flips the phone open to read her message: _I’m craving fake Mexican food, any chance I could con you into a midnight Taco Bell run?_

Grinning Skye texts back, _you’re not pregnant are you?_

“Not last time I checked,” Jemma says, announcing her presence so suddenly that Skye jumps. Jemma’s got a pair of jeans on; through her shirt is clearly one of her nighties. “Though perhaps we should swing by a gas station and grab one of those too, for all I know I could be the next Virgin Mary.”

“You’re way too hot to be the Virgin Mary.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not,” she admits, shifting her weight awkwardly from foot to foot, “so, Taco Bell?”

“Oh hells yeah, let’s do this thing!”

 

**August 25th 2011**

“I’m not pregnant,” Jemma announces, when Skye comes home to find her lying on the couch wrapped in probably a million blankets looking like death.

There’s at least three chocolate bar wrappers on the table, and it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to put two and two together.

“I think I have some Midol in my purse.”

“I love you,” she says so casually and effortlessly.

Skye only struggles for a moment before she says, “love you too,” and rubs at Jemma’s head in what she hopes is a soothing manner. If the way she sighs against her touch and leans back is any indicator then it surely is.

 

**August 26th 2011**

“I made you another mixtape,” Skye says, handing the CD to a still very much cramping and hating the world Jemma Simmons.

“Please tell me it doesn’t-”

“It doesn’t,” Skye finishes for her already knowing the question and the appropriate answer.

“And might I ask the occasion for this particular mixtape,” Jemma says, as she flips open the case to reveal the CD Skye had spent a good twenty minutes of her work time coloring in with a red sharpie.

“It’s a period mix,” she grins when Jemma lets out an exasperated sigh, “has all the best songs for the season. Here Comes The Flood, I’ve Got the World On A String, Sunday Blood Sunday-”

“Why do I put up with you?”

“Because we’re married,” Skye supplies, stealing the disk from her fingers and putting it in their radio.

“Ah yes,” Jemma agrees, burying herself in the blankets, not even bothering to pretend to read over her work notes anymore.

“Now, we’ve got music, step two is chocolate-on-chocolate cookies,” Skye insists, pulling Jemma up from the couch and into the kitchen.

“You’re way too energetic, like those freakishly happy people in tampon commercials,” she moans.

“You’ll thank me later.”

And an hour later, when they’re in those god awful matching aprons Fitz had bought them, singing in the kitchen like every cliché romantic comedy movie in the history of romantic comedies, Jemma belting out, “and I keep, keep bleeding love,” Skye thinks that her little smile is thanks enough.

 

**September 9th, 2011**

“You’re hogging all the blue string,” Skye says, reaching over in an attempt to steal the string from Jemma, but the other woman jumps out of her reach at the last moment.

“There’s some blue right over there,” she objects.

“That is _teal_ ,” Skye replies, mock offended, “I can’t believe I married somebody who doesn’t know the difference between blue and _teal._ ”

“Isn’t teal a type of blue?”

 

**September 11th, 2011**

They’re wandering through the park right as it strikes midnight, even though Ward seems to think they’re breaking all sorts of rules by being there that late at night. Not that anybody has listened to his warnings for more than a minute.

“It’s officially your birthday, you know what that means,” Skye says, grinning at Jemma like a fool. There’s alcohol running through her veins, birthday drinks in honor of the special day, but that’s not the reason she feels so warm and bubbly inside.

“No,” Jemma groans, knowing what’s coming.

Which seeing as she and Fitz had been threatening to sing them since around nine the day before, she should have had a good idea of what is coming.

“Oh yes,” Skye replies, before leading the boys in a very horrible rendition of the Happy Birthday song.

By the second version, Jemma joins them, dancing around in the park in the middle of the night, singing off-key birthday songs for the world to hear.

 

**October 15th 2011**

They’re at the mall trying on the most awful things that they can think of, and even though Skye had always hated shopping, and always hated dressing rooms, she can’t find it in her to mind, when she’s sharing the changing room with Jemma and they’re taking photos of themselves in every awful creation they can come up with.

There’s a scarf with a Red Blood cell pattern that Jemma insists upon buying for some silly reason, while Skye grabs a skirt that makes her feel like a ballerina when she twirls. The woman ringing them up gives them the craziest look in the world. Skye just smirks back at her, because she’s having the time of her life and doesn’t care what anybody else thinks.

That is until when they’re on their way out of the mall walking hand in hand, Jemma stops, pulling Skye backward with her, in front of a of a lingerie store.

“I’ve always wanted to go in one of those places,” Jemma admits like it’s a great shameful secret, “but I’ve been too scared to go alone and-”

“Let’s do it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, why not,” Skye replies, trying to keep her cool, because right now all she can think about it Jemma in that lacy red outfit in the display window and that thought is doing the exact opposite of keeping her cool.

They spent the first few minutes in the shop awkwardly lurking about until, Jemma finds something pink and lacy and holds it up to her chest, smiling at Skye all innocent and asks, “how do you think I’d look?”

“Flawless, like usual,” she replies, meaning it far more than her words can simply show.

A sales clerk interrupts them before they can get any further, “if you’d ladies like we have dressing rooms.”

“That would be lovely,” Jemma says, grabbing the frilly pieces of clothing off the rack and letting herself be led to the dressing room.

Skye is in turn shown to a neat little sitting area, that gives her a perfect view of how Jemma looks when she exits the dressing room in nothing but those tiny pieces of lace.

“I did saw flawless, didn’t I?”

“Oh Skye, don’t tease,” she turns slightly pink as she speaks; rubbing at her neck in the nervous way that Skye is so fond of.

“Your friend is right,” the sales clerk says, “whoever the lucky man in your life is will love those.”

“Oh, I’m married,” Jemma says, quelling the feeling of jealousy in her chest before it can even begin to grow.

“Your husband then.”

“Wife, actually,” Jemma corrects.

“Ah, I didn’t-”

“That’s me,” Skye informs her, raising a small hand to remind them of her presence.

“And I already know your opinion,” Jemma replies, shooting Skye a playful wink before twirling around to look in a mirror.

 

**November 3rd, 2011**

“I hate to be doing this, but this conference is really important for my scientific career and,” Jemma is rambling, nervously standing at the door with her suitcase beside her.

“I already told you it was fine.”

“I know, but,” she shakes her head, “I’m going to miss our one year Anniversary.”

“You’ll make it up to me when you get back,” Skye assures her, “plus it’s not like we have the most _traditional_ of marriages anyways. You go do you science thing, have fun, tell me all about it when you get home.”

“Are you sure?”

“Jemma.”

“I know - okay,” she huffs, before her voice softens, “just, if you need anything call me, got it? Anything at all! I’ll always answer, or I’ll try to answer, unless I’m sleeping, and well you know me so - but I’ll try to answer.”

“Aye aye, captain,” she teases, before pulling Jemma against her into a hug, “I’ll miss you, even if you are a terrible wife-y from time to time.”

“I’ll miss you too,” Jemma replies, hugging Skye tighter than she’s ever been hugged before.

 

**November 5th 2011**

“Happy Anniversary,” Skye says into Jemma’s answering machine, “looks like you’re already asleep, probably because you’re going to have to wake up freakishly early, but I wanted to wish you a Happy Anniversary, since we’ve officially been married for one year. I mean - technically we didn’t get married till the evening, so I guess you still have some time but,” she sighs, wanting to say so much, wanting to admit everything that has been on her mind for the past few months, but that’s something that should be said in person, something she needs to wait on saying until she knows Jemma feels the same way, “Some days I just realize how lucky I am to have married my best friend, to get to have sleepovers every night and get to eat breakfast sitting side by side, and I miss you Jem, I miss you a lot. Call me when you wake up, I’ll try not to sleep through my phone ringing.”

 

**November 5th 2011**

She ends up sleeping through the ringing of her phone and wakes around nine to her screen flashing with a missed call alert.

Half-asleep Skye types in her password, skipping past the demands her phone’s automated inbox, by pressing the buttons before the question can even be asked. When her passcode goes in successfully, she turns on the speakerphone, and buries back under the covers, closing her eyes so that she can imagine Jemma’s there beside her when her voice fills the room, “Looks like you slept through the phone ringing, which is probably a good thing since knowing you, I bet you didn’t get to bed until around three. Oh god, I’m terrible at leaving messages, maybe I should just call back later,” there’s a pause and the sound of somebody fumbling with the phone before she’s greeted by the sounds of one of Jemma’s soft sighs, “I’m sorry I’m not there in Boston to wake you up with a cup of coffee and that sugary mess you like to call cereal. That’s where I should be right now, and I’m not, so I’m sorry. You’re wonderful, Skye, one of the greatest friends a girl could have, way better than the horror stories I had dreamed up of what you would be like when the guys told me they had found somebody. And I’m really glad to have met you, I’m glad that we made it this far. I - I just,” she doesn’t even realize that she’s holding her breath until she hears Jemma struggle with her words, “I’ll be home soon. Have a great day and happy anniversary.”

There’s a click of the phone being hung up, before an automated voice fills the room once more, instructing her to click various numbers to save, delete, or repeat the message. She struggles with the phone’s controls for a moment before a soft voice begins again, “Looks like you slept through the phone ringing…”

 

**December 25th 2011**

“So I know we agreed not to go too overboard on gifts,” Skye says, “and you vetoed any mixtapes due to your obvious lack of trust in me.”

“Need I remind you of what happened last year,” Jemma says, as if Skye could forget what had quite possibly been the best gift in the history of gag gift ever.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re implying,” she teases, “but I promise there’s not even a vague reference to the song of doom.”

Jemma laughs at that, a beautiful laugh that could be Skye’s Christmas gift in and of itself.

“Anyways, I made you this. I hope you like it, I know it’s sort of cheesy and stuff,” Skye explains, handing the wrapped gift to Jemma.

She watches with a soft smile as Jemma carefully unwraps the package in the same way Skye always has, they may not have much in common, still disagreeing on the appropriate times to be awake or asleep, but they both open gifts in the same manner and she feels like that should be some sort of sign.

“Oh Skye,” she says when she has finally opened the gift, her fingers run along the cover of the album with a soft reverence.

“I took pictures of all the friend stuff we did over the last few months while we were reliving our childhood or whatever,” Skye says with a little awkward laugh, “and I figured, what better way to showcase everything than an album.”

“It’s lovely,” Jemma says, looking up at Skye in a way that makes her heart want to burst, “you’re the best.”  

 

**December 31st 2011**

Skye tries not to think about how they were this time last year, instead she enjoys the moment that they’re living in. She’s in the company of great friends, in a moment that she wishes could last forever, that she thinks could last forever if only they somehow managed to hold onto the feeling that they felt in that moment at a party where hardly anybody knows their names.

It’s freeing and fun and when the clock strikes midnight; their kiss isn’t as awkward as it was last year. Skye’s already prepared herself to expect the only fireworks around to be those going off on the televised coverage of New York City.

Even so, as their lips touch in the first kiss that they’ve shared since the night of Skye’s drunken birthday, she can’t help herself from enjoying the moment.

And maybe pretending that one day things might be different.

That one day Jemma won’t pull back a moment later giggling softly and tug her into a hug, but rather hold on for dear life and kiss her like she’s the last person on earth.

But until then, she gets to enjoy watching how Jemma lights up when somebody turns on the radio, how she whispers, “this is my jam,” to Skye like they’re all alone, before she grabs her hand and leads her to where the rest of their vague acquaintances are singing, “like it’s the end of the world!”

 

**January 7th 2012**

She supposes that she should have seen the signs that something was going wrong, that night at the terrible restaurant that Skye had picked out upon realizing that it was Ward’s birthday and that if you went to this particular place on your birthday you left with a giant sombrero full of chips, but she hadn’t really been looking.

Everything had finally seemed to be going right in her life and she hadn’t thought, hadn’t taken the time to notice how the guys, who would normally have been practically on top of each other, were sitting further apart than she had ever seen them.

She should have paid attention to the small talk that Fitz made about citizenship quizzes and the way Ward’s shoulders tensed every time he mentioned them.

Instead she focused on the fact that there was a giant sombrero loaded up with chips on the center of their table and missed the so obvious problem in front of her, unable to stop it before it became too much to bear.

 

**February 14th 2012**

“Were you the one that made the heart shaped cookies?”

“Yes,” Jemma answers, almost hesitantly, “unless there was somebody else in this apartment that knows how to make decent cookies.”

“Hey! That was extremely uncalled for!”

 

**February 19th 2012**

“I still can’t believe you signed us up for this,” Skye grumbles, stuffing her hands into her coat pocket, as if that will somehow trap the warmth that her body so desperately needs.

“I can’t believe your unwillingness to do charity work,” Fitz replies back, sticking his tongue out at her, before poking it back between his lips in a hurry as if sensing the cold air.

“Technically only Fitz and I signed up for it,” Jemma offers, before looking at where Skye and Ward stand, “if you two wanted to you could leave.”

“I just don’t understand why they’re doing this in the middle of winter, I mean, I would understand if we lived in California or Florida or somewhere warm, but whoever thought Relay for Life would be a great idea to hold during a New England winter, seriously needs to get their head checked. Preferably before I die of frostbite,” Skye grumbles, glaring up at the night sky hoping that the clouds hiding out the stars have nothing to do with the fact that snow might be coming.

“Just think once we get walking our blood will get pumping and then you won’t even feel the cold,” Fitz insists in a far too chipper voice.

Jemma, at least, seems to talk pity on her and says, “I brought some quilts to put in our rest area and there’s a portable heater which should help.”

“Have I ever mentioned how much of an amazing and wonderfully thoughtful wife you are?”

“Once or twice,” Jemma teases, “though I don’t mind hearing it again.”

 

**February 20th 2012**

“Somebody needs to quiz me on state capitols, otherwise I am going to fail and be deported back to Scotland,” Fitz whines, when the night begins to drag on, “and you guys don’t want me to be deported do you?”

“Well,” Skye drawls.

“Don’t answer that,” he quips quickly,” instead quiz me.”

She sighs before giving in and says, “Alaska.”

“Juneau.”

“California?”

“Sacramento.”

“New Mexico?”

“Santé Fe.”

“Massachusetts,” she asks, smirking as soon as she says it.

“Oh I don’t know,” Fitz replies sarcastically, “it’s not like we live in it or anything.”

“Not at all.”

**March 3rd 2012**

They’re celebrating.

Fitz is drinking his weight in cheap booze, somebody even baked an apple pie, and an off-key rendition of the Star Spangled Banner starts up at some point.

Everybody seems to be enjoying themselves, until Skye looks over her shoulder towards where Ward is standing at the back of the room with an expression she can’t quiet decipher on his face.

 

**March 13th 2012**

They’re watching some terrible sitcom on the television when everything goes to shit.

Months later she would be able to remember the taste of cheap takeout on her tongue, the awful laugh track in the background, and the way Jemma seemed completely shocked to find her phone ringing at seven pm on a weekday.

“It’s probably work,” she says, grabbing it off their coffee table even though Skye could easily see Fitz’s profile picture take up the screen showing exactly who it was that was calling.

It takes no more than two minutes, two minutes in which the sitcom makes another lame joke and Skye doesn’t feel comfortable laughing along with the laugh track, before Jemma reappears, the phone still pressed in her ear, she keeps saying things like, “I’m so sorry,” and other assurance that things will be alright.

Her first thought is to assume the worst, that something happened to Ward or even that something happened to Buddy, he’s an old dog after all, and it would have only been a matter of time.

So when Jemma scoots by her to grab her laptop off the dining room table saying something about lawyers she finds herself asking, “is everybody alright?”

And that’s when she sees it, the sort of soft sad look on Jemma’s face, like somebody about to break bad news, she pressed the phone’s speaker into her shoulder and tells Skye in the kindest tone she can manage, “Fitz and Ward are getting a divorce.”

**March 14th 2012**

“What the actual fuck, Ward?”

“I’m assuming Simmons told you.”

“Yeah, I was in the room when Fitz called her,” Skye says tersely, “why didn’t you guys mention that things weren’t going well or that-”

“That’s not why this is happening,” he cuts her off.

“Then why?”

She needs some way to justify this, some way to explain how the one relationship that she could have truly believed was real was breaking apart before her eyes.

“We had a contract, the marriage isn’t real,” he reminds her, “you know that - the thing you have with Simmons is the same way. Now that Fitz has his citizenship it was only a matter of time-”

“That’s bullshit; you and I both know it.”

 

**March 17th 2012**

Skye spends the rest of her week purposely avoiding contact with either of the guys.

At work whenever Ward tries to say something to her in the hallways or between the cubicles, she turns the other way before he can even manage to get anything out.

And when she sees Fitz back at her apartment, talking with Jemma about lawyers and paperwork and leases for new apartments, she can’t even manage to return his almost friendly wave.

When their Friday date night finally rolls around, Skye grabs a bottle of wine and pours both her and Jemma a glass before she says, “I hate men.”

There’s not even a moment’s hesitation before Jemma replies, “me too.”

 

**March 20 2012**

She wakes in the middle of the night struggling from a nightmare and calls Ward. It takes three rings before he picks up his voice obviously groggy and clearly displeased with her, but Skye doesn’t care.

“Who gets the dog in the divorce,” she asks, as soon as they get past the _what the fuck, Skye_ and the _do you have any idea what time it is._

“What,” Ward replies, still half-asleep.

“Buddy,” she explains, “when you and Fitz get your divorce who gets him?”

“You called me at three in the morning to ask that.”

“Yes, because it’s important. Because, Buddy was the reason I met you two assholes, giving him to you guys got me fired from my job, which made me live on your couch, and then I owed you a favor and met Jemma and-” She’s crying, and she fucking hates crying.

Her hands scrub at the tears as she tries to keep the broken off choked noises quiet enough that Ward can’t hear them. If he can he at least has the sense to remain quiet about it, not that she can seem to continue talking anyways. She’s a wreck and she hates it, she hates that she’s feeling this way, she hates that everything’s changing.

Finally though he does speak, voice softer than she’s ever heard his voice before, “we’ll all still be friends when this is over, this doesn’t change that.”

Except it does.

She knows it does, and he sure as hell knows it does.

They both know damn well she’s not just talking about the dog; she’s talking about everything, about the stability that for once in her life she thought she had.

The foundation that she had built her life upon, their little family of misfits.

“Are you at your apartment right now,” he asks, breaking what had been a mix of silence and quiet sobs.

“Yes,” she answers slowly.

“Okay, I’m coming over give me twenty minutes.”

“You don’t have to-”

“Yeah, I do.”

 

**March 20th 2012**

Twenty minutes later there’s a knock on her door.

Skye takes one last glance in their hallway mirror at her reddened cheeks, rubbing at them in hopes that she can look a little bit less like she’s spent the last hour crying, before she goes to unlatch the door. It thankfully hadn’t been snowing outside, but Ward still looks a mess in his black pea coat standing awkwardly on her doorstep.

A small part of her wants to take relief in the fact that she’s not the only one that feels like shit, but that small part is not enough to squash the overall dreadful feeling that the air around them seems to carry.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted tea, but I put a kettle on,” she says and she leads him in.

“Do you have travel mugs?”

Skye nods once, “you wanna walk and talk,” she asks, while she heads into the kitchen in search of the matching set of travel mugs her and Jemma purchased last winter.

Ward shuffles in awkwardly behind her, only relaxing a fraction of an inch when she hands him the warm mug of tea.

“It’s Earl Gray,” he says after taking a sip, it’s only when she says it does she realize why that’s a problem.

“Shit, Ward I didn’t - I have other kinds.”

“No, this is good.”

“You sure?”

He nods his head once, so Skye let’s it be, quickly stuffing her keys into her pockets before grabbing a coat off the rack, Jemma’s coat technically, but Skye feels a bit like she’ll need the support for this conversation.

“Well, come on then,” she says to Ward, who was still standing awkwardly about.

They spend the first few minutes of their walk in silence, nothing but the sounds of an early Boston morning surrounding them.

Skye can’t remember the last time she’d just walked around in the early hours of the morning, when it’s still dark outside and the sun is a while off, but it feels nice.

It feels relaxing, and she guesses she gets why he wanted this.

It also has a way of distracting her from their yet unspoken conversation, which she figures was also his point.

Finally, Skye breaks their silence and says, “do you want to talk about it?”

Simple, out there, an offer, because he came over to her, so clearly there’s been something on his mind.

“When I think of where I was four years ago, I’m happy,” he admits after a moment, “I have a good life, a good job, good friends -  much more than I had ever expected given my circumstances. I should feel grateful for all of this, for this opportunity, but instead I just feel-”

“Awful,” Skye supplies, knowing the feeling all too well.

“Exactly.”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” she starts, because she’s always wondered this, always wondered about the one story she could never get him to tell, “where were you four years ago?”

He stops walking and turns to look at her now, “you really don’t know? I was sure Simmons would have told you by now, it was all a big joke between them when everything started.”

“Nobody ever told me,” Skye says, “I mean - come on, I spent a good few months thinking you guys were the real deal, you seemed like the real deal.”

She still held onto that belief, that there was no way all of that could have been faked, the fond smiles, the way their bumped into each other like magnets drawn inevitably back together. Their romance had been what taught Skye to believe in love again, and even when she found out it was faked, she still sometimes thought she could catch glimmers of something real in there.

Now, looking at the way his face fell at her words, she had a hard time believing that she was that far off.

“You guys always used to joke about running off to Vegas and eloping. I mean, I guess that part was real but-”

“We didn’t run off to Vegas.”

“You didn’t,” Skye says, suddenly perking up.

“I mean, Fitz ran off to Vegas. His visa was expiring, he hadn’t filled out the necessary paperwork and come May he would have been tossed back to Scotland for the next three years without a second thought. He ran off to Vegas to get completely drunk and blow away all his hopes and money.”

“And you followed him there,” she asks, a bit too eagerly.

Ward lets out a little laugh at that. “Our story is not that romantic.”

“It’s not?”

“No,” he informs her, “no, there was nobody to follow him out there. And what’s the first thing you do if you’re lonely and depressed and in Vegas of all places?”

“Gamble?”

“After that.”

“Hire a hooker?”

At that he gestured to himself.

It took a moment before it hit her, but then she remembered the drunk haze of her and Jemma’s bachelorette party when somebody had joked about how there was a pole and how Ward ought to go get up on it, she remember the way he had turned off the tv the second one of those promos for Magic Mike came on, and she remembered the immigration officer that had dared to ask her if she was a prostitute believing it a possibility given her acquaintances. Suddenly far too many things began to make sense at once and she almost felt sick when she realized it.

That stuffy suits and subtle maturity, a guy that Skye had practically looked up to, was just as messed up - if not more - than her.

“Shit, I had no idea-”

“It’s not exactly something I advertise.”

“No shit.”

“Now, imagine you were me,” he explains, and she sort of can, after all, had she not gotten out of the back of her van or had she stuck with Miles that might have been her fate in a few years’ time, “imagine some random guy that hires you for the night offers you one hundred thousand to go marry him at some drive-thru wedding place so that he can get his green card.”

“I’d say yes,” she admits.

“I’m so thankful I did, I really am,” Ward says, reaching up to run a hand through his hair and make it more of a mess than it already was, “I’ve spent the last four years being thankful that I was here, thankful that I had a job and a place to live and mostly that I had a new start. The thing is I don’t want to have to start over again.”

He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a small manila envelope that he passes over to her.

Her fingers shake slightly, which she tries to blame on the cold as she opens it and pulls out a check written to Ward, signed with Fitz’s mess of a signature for twenty-five thousand dollars.

“He gave me that before we- but I haven’t had the heart to cash it.”

“You should tell him how you feel,” she says, and she knows it’s hypocritical because she’s spent the last year avoiding telling Jemma how she feels, but this is different, it’s Ward and Fitz, and if any two people belong together in the whole wide world, she reckons it’s them.

“Skye, the thing you need to realize is that not every story has a happy ending, sometimes things just don’t work out - Leo and I were one of those things.”

 _Leo_ , she’s never heard Ward call him anything other than Fitz before.

If that isn’t a sign she doesn’t know what is.

“You’re right. Not every story has a happy ending, but if you wait long enough, sometimes you can make your own.”

 

**April 10th 2012**

She’s in the kitchen making some sort of microwave dinner when she hears Fitz’s voice carry over from where he’s in the living room with Jemma.

She’d been doing her best to avoid hearing his side of the conversation, not wanting to admit that somehow she and Jemma had each ended up with a guy to side with and were stuck waiting till this all came to its inevitable end.

That was until she hears Fitz talking, sounding almost broken, “and then he just handed me the papers.”

Before she can stop herself, she’s out of the kitchen and standing at the back of the couch, asking, “wait, Ward is the one divorcing you?”

There’s a moment of hesitation from both Fitz and Jemma, neither of them knowing what to say, and alright she did just sort of appear out of nowhere, but this is important enough that she can’t wait for the answer.

Finally Fitz nods his head once, and that had not been the answer she had been expecting, not at all.

“That asshole,” she says, before crossing over to the other side of the couch to pull Fitz into a long-deserved hug.

 

**April 11th 2012**

“You gave him the papers,” she rounds on him the next day at work.

“Yes,” Ward answers her without any shame.

“But you still have feeling for him?”

“Yes,” he answers again.

“Then why would you-”

“He gave me the check first.”

“And you gave him the papers the same day,” Skye all but hisses out, “which means you had to have had them for a while, you were just sitting on them waiting for the right moment to say ‘ _good morning, how’d you sleep, also we’re getting a divorce’_.”

“It’s more complicated than that.” He must see her obvious disbelief at his words, because a second later he says, “don’t give me that look. We both know it’s more complicated than that.”

“I didn’t have to be.” She shakes her head, when he moves as though to start speaking again and says, “one day you’re going to pull your head out of your ass long enough to realize it didn’t have to be this complicated, that things didn’t have to go this way, and by then it’ll be too late.”

 

**April 12th 2012**

She texts him late at night when she can’t seem to sleep: _you know he has feelings for you, right?_ _real feelings._

Ward never replies to her.

 

**April 18th 2012**

When her birthday finally rolls around she hardly feels any special to be twenty-two, even the little cake that Jemma makes her can only make her feel so happy, not when she’s so abruptly aware that even if she wanted to hold some sort of birthday celebration now, she wouldn’t be able to have two of her best friends there since they currently couldn’t be around each other.

“I guess I just don’t feel much like being in the birthday mood,” Skye explains, when she notices Jemma’s worried look.

“How does splitting a bottle of wine and complaining about how the men in our lives need to learn to communicate and tell each other how they feel sound,” Jemma offers instead.

“That sounds amazing.”

She just tries not to feel too hypocritical as she talks about the guys failing to communicate, whenever she can never seem to find the ability to do it properly herself. The wine only tastes slightly bitter in her mouth.

 

**May 30th 2012**

It’s over breakfast when Jemma breaks the news, the news that they both knew was coming, that they’ve both stood on the sidelines watching for far too long.

“They’re officially divorced,” she says, and it seems so final, so unchangeable, and so wrong.

“I suppose this means everything’s changing.”

“I wish it wasn’t.”

“Me too.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading along! (and for those of you that read this when it was first posted and are rereading for some reason - well, let's just keep what used to be written here our little secret, okay?)
> 
> Here are this chapters notes:  
> 1\. Movies referenced this chapter are: The Proposal, Magic Mike  
> 2\. Songs referenced this chapter are: Lucky by Jason Marz, Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis, and 2012 by Jay Sean  
> 3\. I don't know what the weather was actually like in Boston on most of these days, because this information is very hard to find and sometimes I just put snow in certain scenes because snow is romantic.   
> 4\. Teal is a shade of green, not a shade of blue. This has been a life lesson to all of you.  
> 5\. The Red Blood Cell scarf does exist, I saw it at Nordstrom's last weekend, it was awful.   
> 6\. If you go to Chevy's on your birthday, or pretend it's somebody's birthday you get a Sombrero full of chips. I highly recommend this. (I'm sure there are other restaurants that do this too)  
> 7\. I don't know why people would hold Relay for Life during a New England winter, but while working on that was in March in California, a program coordinator told us a horror story about the one time they put on a Relay for Life and a snowstorm hit and I felt like including this in the story.


	6. Year 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay guys, so I set this story in Boston before I remembered what a mess Fall of '12 to Spring of '13 was. So I apologize for any angst that comes associated with the events of those times, I tried to handle everything as best as I could.

**June 3rd 2012**

“We need something to get our minds off of _things_ ,” Skye had said when she had originally presented the plan for their vacation, it was summer and with everything that had gone on the last few months it didn’t feel much like summer.

She honestly couldn’t remember the last good day she had had.

At some point her and Jemma’s _date_ nights had turned into _help our friends sort through a messy divorce_ nights, which once that was settled became _hypocritically bitch about the men in our lives_ nights.

That needed to change.

Which was why she had spent the last two days looking up fun things to do in the area that they had never tried before and had almost by accident stumbled upon the fact that about an hour away from them some county was holding their local fair.

And after explaining to Jemma what exactly a county fair entailed, she had agreed to go.

So far the day had gone off without a hitch. Since they had arrived at the fair, Skye had introduced Jemma to the wonders of funnel cake and deep fried everything, and in turn been absolutely schooled as Jemma proved that having a freakishly high IQ actually made those complete scams of carnival games winnable. After shoving their giant stuffed panda into the car, along with an assortment of other stuffed animals that Jemma had proudly won for her, riding a few rides and eating corn on the cob for dinner their night had seemed as though it was wrapping up.

That was until on what Skye had expected to be their trip out of the fair; Jemma had made one last detour, leading them to the one carnival game that they had yet to play.

“We don’t need a pet,” Skye insists, even though she can already see the cogs in Jemma’s brain whirring to life as she observes the game’s attendant showing how _easy_ it is to win a goldfish. “The fish normally die within a week anyways.”

“A win-win either way,” Jemma replies to that, because apparently Skye had forgotten she was dating a biologist who liked to take animals apart when they died, “just think of the fish as a uh… symbol of our love.”  

“You’re awful,” she replies, but hands the attendant three dollars anyways.

“For five dollars you get six balls instead of two,” the attendant says.

“She’ll only need the first one,” Skye says.

True to her word, Jemma takes the first ping pong ball in her hand, rolling it around once, before tossing it with extreme ease into the red glass in the center of the table.

“Where were you when I needed a beer pong partner,” Skye says, letting out a low whistle.

“Working,” she answers, giving Skye a sly grin, before taking their prize for the slightly disgruntled attendant.

“Oh ha ha, very funny.”

“I thought so,” Jemma replies ever chipper, holding the plastic cup with their new pet fish up in it to squint at.

“No dissecting him until he dies of natural causes.”

Jemma lets out a little laugh at that, which is neither confirmation nor denial of Skye’s demands, and is not very reassuring. However, she’s long since learned that when it comes to Jemma Simmons it is best to just take what she gets.

They’re once again on their way out, but it’s Skye who detours them this time, by saying, “we never rode the Ferris wheel.”

“I thought you wanted to head home,” Jemma says, and there’s something in her tone that Skye should have paid attention to, but she misses it.

She just shakes her head and says, “the best part of any fair is the Ferris wheel - we have to ride it. Please, Jemma, please.”

“Ah okay, sure.”

It’s hesitant, but Skye jumps at the opportunity, because there’s something she’s wanted to do for a while and the Ferris wheel seems like her perfect chance.

All goes well at first. Jemma’s got the fish on her lap and she’s chatting with Skye a mile a minute instead of enjoying the ride, but things are going well enough.

That is until they stop at the very top.

She expects the ride to start moving again as it usually does, even cranes her head over the side to see if somebody is getting off, but nobody is. Instead there seems to be some sort of technically failure and the ride’s attendant calls out, “it’ll be just a minute folks,” in what probably ought to be a reassuring manner.

For Skye it works just fine, Jemma is a completely different story.

When Skye looks over at her, she can see her shaking in her seat, breath coming far too rapidly.

“Hey, are you okay,” she asks.

“I’m afraid of heights,” Jemma blurts out, ducking her head in shame.

“Why didn’t you say something before we got on the Ferris wheel?”

“You seemed so excited. I didn’t want to let you down, and I figured how bad could it be, but you know,” Jemma looks over the edge at that, only to duck her head back in a moment later.

She’s shaking and Skye feels a bit bad for the poor fish in its cup on her lap, but she also feels bad for Jemma because it’s Skye’s fault that they’re up in the damn thing anyways.

Quickly she tries to think of any way to make it better for Jemma, but nothing seems to come up. However, there is one thought that has been in the back of her mind since she saw the Ferris wheel when they pulled into the fair’s parking lot.

“You know,” Skye says, a bit preemptively guilty and a bit nervous at the same time, “one of my childhood dreams had always been to kiss somebody while stuck on the top of the Ferris wheel, and it might help distract you from the height.”

“You really think it would work,” Jemma asks.

“I can be very distracting when I want to be,” she answers in a tone laced with innuendo.

“Yes, that’s certainly true.”

“Jemma, look if you-”

Skye doesn’t get to finish her sentence, because in a second Jemma is kissing her and Skye’s only real thought is that she needs to kiss her back, she needs to make this moment last as long as she can. She forgets about the fact that this is just supposed to be a distraction, or that they’re stuck on top of a Ferris wheel in the middle of a some stupid fair, because Jemma is kissing her exactly how Skye has want to be kissed for the past year or so. She’s desperate, and they both need this.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she knows that this will be their moment, when they pull away this will be when Skye confesses her feelings, lays it all out there and everything becomes amazing.

Everything feels so amazing in that moment, she almost never wants the Ferris wheel to move, but it does, as so many things inevitably do, and Jemma pulls back a look of pure pleasure on her face that Skye hopes is reflected in her own.

Skye opens her mouth, ready to start saying what she’s been holding onto for too long, but Jemma beats her too it.

“Thank you, for being distracting and for being such an amazing friend,” Jemma says quickly, “I know you’re not really, you know, but it means the world to me that you’d help me forget about the height and stuff so, ah, I just, thanks Skye.”

That, had not been what she had expecting at all, and she must be gaping because Jemma suddenly looks even more embarrassed and awkward.

“I’m so sorry,” Jemma continues, “I know you’re straight, so it was rude of me to just fling myself at you like that, but you did offer and I just - I’m sorry. This is so awkward.”

No.

No, that couldn’t be what she thought, had that been it all this time, the one thing that had stood in the way of her and Jemma being together was that she had assumed Skye couldn’t even be interested.

If that was true then all she would have to do now is correct Jemma, and Skye intends to do that, she really does, but for some reason she finds herself says, “I’m straight,” instead.

 

**June 4th 2012**

She had spent the entire night trying to figure out how she had messed up, how she had been unable to just say how she had really felt when her opportunity had been right before her eyes.

Skye had yet to come up with any proper answers and it was incredibly frustrating.

She plans and replans what to say in the morning, as they’re both getting ready for work. She images a braver version of herself that snags Jemma by her waist and pulls her into a kiss before saying, “I’m in lesbians with you,” like a character from that dumb movie Fitz had once forced them to watch.

Instead she just finds herself complaining about the name that Jemma had given their fish, “you can’t just go name the fish after some science person I’ve never heard of, it’s not even fair.”

“I won her, so I can name her whatever I like.”

“Also when did the fish suddenly become a woman?”

 

**June 12th 2012**

“Hey Mac,” she coos down at the fish tank, “how’s my favorite fish in the entire world.”

“For the last time her name is Anne McLaren,” Jemma argues, “not Mac.”

“Mhmm, sure thing, babe.”

“Skye! Don’t ignore me!”

 

**July 4th 2012**

“You’ve been an American citizen for how long and you haven’t even seen Fourth of July fireworks?”

“Technically I’m not a citizen yet,” Jemma points out.

“Super not the point,” Skye objects, “ _the point_ was that your lack of firework watching is unpatriotic, and as your wife I am super offended and deeply in need for correcting this.”

“We really don’t have it.”

“It’s my civic duty,” Skye says, still slightly appalled by the fact that they’ve never done this properly, “now go get two of those quilts I love so very much and get your cute little ass in my van so we can go watch the fireworks like normal human beings.”

 

**August 19th 2012**

It feels weird being at what used to be the guy’s apartment without Fitz being there. She finds that she keeps looking over her shoulder expecting to hear the whistle of the kettle and a Scottish accent ramble at her about keeping her shoes off of the carpet and to put her drink on a coaster, but it’s just her and Ward in the apartment.

Every word she speaks seems to echo off of the empty spaces.

They were supposed to be working on stuff for work, but Skye can’t seem to find the motivation to do much of anything as the realization of what’s missing sinks in.

Even the usual distraction of Buddy demanding to be pet cannot keep a smile on her face for very long.

When Ward gets up to get the takeout from the delivery guy she rises off the couch as well, eyes sweeping across familiar bookshelves and counter space trying to remember which knickknacks are missing from their usual places.

It’s as she’s doing this that she notices a photograph, one she had almost missed on first glance, but so clearly on that she had never seen before.

But it gives her so much hope that she cannot help lifting the frame off of the shelf and staring at the figure in the frame.

It’s a candid picture of Fitz playing with Buddy at the park that they’ve all been known to frequent, he’s smiling and looking up adoringly at whoever the photographer had been, at Ward.

“Skye, how many times have I told you not to snoop?”

**September 11th 2012**

“I’m twenty-seven,” Jemma says, as though she’s announcing that she has the plague or that the stock market has crashed.

She’s starring in their hallway mirror scrutinizing her face as though looking for wrinkles or age spots or some other sign that she’s officially over the hill.

Skye had no idea that the other woman could be quite so dramatic, but the faces Jemma is making in the mirror are signs of just how dramatic she can be.

“It’s not that bad, I heard twenty-seven’s the new twenty-one,” Skye says, sliding up to stand beside her, staring at her in the reflection of the mirror.

“Says the twenty-two years old.”

“Says your incredibly supportive wife who thinks that you don’t look a day over twenty.”

“Oh is that so,” Jemma rolls her eyes, before bringing her hands up to pinch at her cheeks with a frown.

“It is,” Skye says honestly, “you look beautiful every day and I’m constantly incredibly jealous of that fact.”

Jemma sighs softly, before bumping her hip into Skye’s playfully. “You know you don’t have to say that just because it’s my birthday,” she teases before finally turning away from the mirror and heading off towards the kitchen.

Skye only admits, “I’m not,” once she knows that Jemma is out of earshot.

 

**October 22nd 2012**

The storm starts off small, Jemma remarking on the obscene amount of rain and how she absolutely hates it when it rains.

They make cookies inside their apartment in order to distract from the poor weather outside.

It’s still raining long after their cookies have cooled.

 

**October 26th 2012**

The whole of the east coast seemingly hit by the storm of the century, it’s no surprise when she gets an email saying not to come into work and Jemma’s work at the university is canceled until the storm passes.

Skye would have revealed in the time off, had it not been for the way Jemma moved around their apartment like a skittish cat, glaring at the windows and jumping back every time a burst of wind made something rattle outside.

At night it gets worse, and when she hears a panicked shriek from the other room, she’s up on her feet in an instant, opening Jemma’s door without waiting for permission.

“Skye what are you-” Jemma starts, but Skye doesn’t let her finish, instead she moves across the room to slide in bed with her.

“If you want we can pretend I’m the one afraid of storms who needs somebody to hold onto,” Skye says after a moment, barely more than a whisper, barely able to be heard over the rain outside.

Jemma gasps as the wind whips at the windows again, and buries herself close against Skye, hugging her tightly.  

It’s the first time that they’ve shared a bed (not just the couch) since their honeymoon, but it feels right. Especially when Jemma finally stops shaking after a minute of hugging onto Skye and whispers, “thank you,” into her hair.

 

**November 1st 2012**

When the storm finally let’s up they sit outside on steps of their apartment, watching the water swirl in the streets.

They’re looking the aftereffects of everything awful that had happened, and as Jemma leans against her sighing softly, she’s just glad that they made it through, that they’re together.

And she realizes that she never wants to be alone again.

 

**November 5th 2012**

“You know, of all the things I had thought of doing on my anniversary, cleaning up damage from a hurricane was not on that list,” Skye grumbles, because even the free-shirt they got did not make up for this.

“You really need to learn something about charity and giving back to the people,” Fitz informs her, because he’s the little shit that convinced Jemma to help with whatever community service group that he was currently involved with.

Jemma had, of course, insisted that Skye didn’t have to come, but it was their anniversary and she was going to spend it with her wife - even if that meant cleaning up storm wreckage from small towns.

“Since when did you become some big charity junkie anyways,” Skye says to Fitz.

He has the nerve to look offended at that, like he’s some big vegan who saves puppies in his spare time.

Jemma swoops in though with an explanation that makes sense, “Tripp got him into it during Relay for Life last year, after they had a very loud and vivid debate about Moby Dick.”

Skye vaguely remembered that, at least she remembered hearing Fitz yell _Have you even ready Moby Dick_ at somebody around four am, but she had been too freezing at the time to figure out what had been going on.

“Why does that name sound familiar,” Skye asks.

“He works with me,” Jemma offers, “also a few years back at Fitz’s birthday party you thought I was flirting with him.”

Oh right, she could remember him now, the guy Jemma had been leaning against in the back of the bar. Just the thought of that night made her blood boil again.

“Wait, that was why she stormed off,” Fitz asks his grin far too wide.

“Yes,” she admits.

“But oh god - Tripp is really gay,” he says shaking his head, “and so is Jemma, so just the thought of them together is hilarious.”

“How do you know he’s gay?”

“I just know,” Fitz says far too quickly, and she hates what that could be implying because it’s barely been a few months since Fitz and Ward broke up and she had hoped that she could still somehow fix things.

Now the chances of that seemed to be getting slimmer and slimmer.  

She was pretty sure if she ever saw that Tripp guy again she would give him a piece of her mind and it wouldn’t be very pleasant.

 

**November 10th 2012**

Jemma takes her out to dinner at a fancy restaurant where there aren’t prices on the menus and she feels under-dressed even though she knows she’s not.

For some reasons places like these always make Skye feels uncomfortable, perhaps it’s the thought that she knows Jemma will insist on picking up the tab, or the fact that even water costs a price and they sell fancy wines by the bottle.

If she had to pick one particular reason that places like this put her on edge, it would be the fact that never before in her life had she been able to even think about going to one of these places. They took reservations out months in advance, where hilariously out of her price range and she felt as if even the waiters could tell that she didn’t belong, that she was an orphan who had lived out of a van for a good chunk of her life. Once she and Miles had joked about taking somebody else's reservation and pretending to be part of the high life, but they had never gone through with it.

Now though, she was sitting in the restaurant completely welcomed, watching how Jemma seemed to move about everything with complete ease. They hadn’t even needed a reservation, Jemma had just shown up at the chef came out specifically to chat excitedly with them before showing them to a table.

“We come here all the time for work,” Jemma had explained, and suddenly Skye’s previous mental images of scientists ordering pizza on their late nights in the lab had turned into fancy dinner parties that Jemma had gone out on with her colleges.

Skye had always known that in a normal world Jemma would have been completely out of her league, but now it was practically being shoved in her face, while Jemma casually chatted up their waiter about different types of wine in French of all things.  

Skye couldn’t have even tried to understand them.

It’s only once the waiter leaves that Skye finally asks, “why are we here?”

Jemma has the nerve to look confused at her question, before smiling and saying, “since we were both busy on our anniversary and I missed last year, I had thought dinner would be a good way to make it up to you.”

“Oh, oh,” she hadn’t been expecting that.

Jemma had just told her they were going out to dinner and that she should wear a dress, not that that was what this was supposed to be. That was enough to bring a feeling of guilt inside of her, since she had been so resentful of the place, even though Jemma was just trying to be nice to her.

“You know we could have just gone out to Taco Bell or something, I don’t need anything fancy,” Skye tells her.

“If you want we could leave,” Jemma says, suddenly realizing something, “I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“No, it’s cool - you like your fancy French food, and I’m sure I can find something edible,” she looks over the menu, “maybe.”

Jemma narrows her eyes at her across the table and says, “but you’d rather have a two dollar burrito?”

She hesitates before replying, “yeah.”

“Okay, that works,” and Jemma’s up and out of her chair before Skye can even really process what’s going on.

“Wait- what are you- Jemma hold on!”

“Yes?”

“You’re really okay with just leaving and going to Taco Bell?”

“Why wouldn’t it be,” she asks.

Skye can’t come up with a logical answer to that so she shrugs and says, “because you’re fancy.”

“I’m also terribly cheap and was advised to try one of those Doritos tacos by Fitz and well, I’m not all that fancy, I mean, I like to wear nice dresses and drink nice wine, but I’m already in the fancy dress and there’s a BevMo next to the Taco Bell, so let’s go?”

As Skye stands up, reaching out to take Jemma’s hand while the exit the restaurant she leans in towards Jemma and says, “I just want you to know that you have ruined me for all other women, or men, nobody will ever be able to hold up to my standards after you.”

Jemma just giggles and bumps her hip into Skye’s, “that was the plan all along.”

 

**December 11th 2012**

Jemma gets off work weeks before Skye does for the holidays because she works for the university, which normally is something that Skye would a good deal of time grumbling about, however it’s hard to grumble about something when it involves Jemma stopped by Skye’s work to take her out for lunch.

At least, they had planned on going out for lunch; currently things weren’t looking too good.

“You don’t have to wait around,” Skye tells her, yet again, her eyes not moving from the computer screen as she tries to figure out what could possibly be wrong.

“I don’t mind,” Jemma replies.

“Seriously though, this could take hours,” not that Skye expects it to, “you could go find Ward if you don’t want to eat alone, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

“I’m fine,” she insists, this time a bit more forcefully, probably because Skye had thought to mention Ward.

They were still friends, sort of. She wasn’t exactly clear on which one of the guys were supposed to have won their friendship in the divorce. Apparently, Fitz had won Jemma, while Ward had won Buddy, and Skye was awkwardly floating in between in all trying to mend bridges that nobody particularly wanted to have fixed.

To be fair it had taken Skye a bit of time herself to come around to not wanting to punch Ward in the face every time they bumped into each other in the office, but she had somehow managed, and Skye expected that with time Jemma would eventually stop being bitter.

Probably.

She glances away from the screen once to see Jemma’s cross face before deciding maybe not was more like it.

“Hey, Blake,” she says calling the attention of her coworkers, the one whose computer Skye was supposed to be fixing, “I’m going to need to make some calls about this. So lunch break and then when I get back I should be able to fix it.”

Lying about her ability to fix the computer doesn’t seem to bad when she sees the way Jemma lights up upon realizing that she’s done with her work and that they can finally take their lunch.

Though she does call her out on the lie as they walk down the halls, because apparently Skye’s face gave her away.

“Yes, because you are the master of lies,” Skye teases back.

“I’m not saying that I am, I’m saying that-” she doesn’t get to figure out what Jemma was saying because she stops, and looks up above where they’re standing before freezing in place.

“Mistletoe,” Skye says, following Jemma’s gaze, “we should probably, since we’re married and all.”

“I was just thinking that,” Jemma replies, her eyes still staring up at the strange little leaf, before she turns down to look at Skye with an almost wondrous glimmer in her eyes.

And Skye steps forward, in the space between them and kisses Jemma softly, because she’s at work and people are watching, but also because Jemma Simmons is the type of girl that deserves to be kissed softly under mistletoe.

 

**December 25th 2012**

“Why are you putting red frosting on the gingerbread men?”

“Because it’s festive,” Skye insists, shaking her own head where an oversized Santa hat rests.

“Normally it would be, but yours look like somebody stabbed them and they’re bleeding out.”

“Ouch, true, but ouch.”

 

**January 1st 2013**

By some awful luck their party host happens to invite both Fitz and Ward to the annual New Year’s party, which she supposes isn’t that surprising since they’ve both gone every other year, but that was before the divorce, before things got this awkward.

Neither she nor Jemma had expected that, but as soon as they had realized what was happening, they had each split off to entertain one of the guys and keeping them from interacting at all costs, until things had all gone horribly wrong.

Sometime after the ball drop, Jemma had gone off the find a bathroom and in the meantime, Fitz had somehow found where Skye had been trying to keep Ward distracted, which had ended up with them at a standoff, neither of the guys acknowledging the other’s presence, but both more than happy to chat with Skye as if everything was normal.

It wasn’t.

And she needed to find some way to fix things.

“One of you say something,” Skye says, staring at the empty space between them, refusing to make eye contact with the two men standing on either side of her, “anything.”

Neither of them speaks when she commands, the silence that hangs in the air is awful, the worst way to start off the new year.

First, she misses her once a year kiss with Jemma as the ball drops and now she’s having to try to be a mediator in what is quite possibly one of the most awkward moments of her life. She wants to hit something, or more like someone, two very distinct some ones.

Because if they would only talk, if they would only open their mouths they could fix this, they could fix the hole they had ripped in the little family she had found for herself.

Sometimes Skye thought she needed this more than they did.

“Please,” she barely whispers, “please just talk.”  

Finally, something shifts, Fitz rocks forward on his feet, stuffs his hands in his pockets and looks straight up to meet Ward’s eyes, before blurting out, “I’m moving to Florida.”

It had been better when they were remaining silent, because at least then Skye could hope that things could work out. Instead she was forced to look up just in time to see the look of absolute horror that overtook Ward’s face,

“What,” he asks, in a voice that doesn’t even sound like his own.

“Yeah, what,” Skye adds, just as surprised.

Fitz doesn’t seem affected by that, just squares his shoulders and says, “I was going to tell you, Skye, sooner - except things got busy and,” he mumbles something else that she can’t quite make out before he says, “there was that non-profit group I was working with, the one with hurricane victims and technology for disadvantaged kids, they offered me an executive position last week and I took it.”

She’s not sure how to react, not sure what to say, but this feels like the worst news she could ever have gotten - worse than when Jemma told her the guys were getting a divorce, because at least then she had always believe that eventually they could fix thing. With Fitz leaving there was no way things could be fixed, and the realization was not a great one.

Skye knew she should feel happy for him, it was a good job, doing something he would enjoy. She should say something like _that’s so great_ or _I’m so happy for you_. Except all Skye can seem to think about is how far away Florida is from Boston.

After a moment, when the silence seems to stretch too long she asks, “have you told Jemma yet?”

“Has who told me what?”

 

**January 24th 2013**

“Yes, I miss you too,” Jemma says into the phone and Skye doesn’t even have the guess who is on the other end, even though she can only hear half of the conversation she can imagine Fitz’s voice clearly enough.

“Tell baby _Leopold_ that I miss him too,” Skye says, loud enough that she’s sure her voice can be heard on by the person listening on the other end.

Jemma repeats in anyways, “Skye misses you too,” though she pulls as face at whatever his response is. She tucks the phone against her shoulder, and turns to Skye, “should I be worried that you and Fitz are on a first name basis with each other?”

Skye is about to make some wisecrack back, when she realizes that Jemma doesn’t mean him calling her Skye, but rather using the dreaded name of doom instead.

“Tell Fitz he’s lucky he’s in Florida and I can’t easily go over there and kick his ass.”

Jemma lets out a laugh, before she says into the phone, “Skye asks how the weather is down there?”

 

**February 14th 2013**

“In honor of the storm raging outside, I have selected for tonight the greatest animated movie in the history of Pixar!”

“Cars?”

“Cars really that’s your favorite Pixar movie,” she asks, near scandalized, “really Jemma we need to talk about your inability to pick decent movies, starting with how Cars is the nearly worst Pixar movie in the history of Pixar, second only to Cars 2.”

“I thought they were cute,” Jemma insists.

“Yeah sure, but have you ever thought about it. I mean, where do the cars come from? What happened to the people? How are baby cars made? Why are tractors cows but all other vehicles are people? These are the questions that keep me awake at night after watching that terrible movie,” Skye says, shaking her head, “I mean, had you picked Wall-E or Up I might have understood, even Toy Story was an _acceptable_ answer, but Cars, of all things. Jemma Simmons, this is officially what ends this relationship, I cannot possible be married to somebody who liked _Cars._ ”

“You’re breaking up with me on Valentine’s Day,” Jemma teases.

“Maybe,” Skye teases back, “assuming by the end of this you aren’t thoroughly convinced that Finding Nemo is the greatest.”

“It’s not-” Jemma starts then stops, makes the face of sudden realization and says, “your need to make puns is awful, you realize that right?”

“It’s called Winter Storm Nemo! You had to expect this!”

“Just put on the movie,” Jemma says while poking at her, “and maybe I’ll forgive you.”

“Maybe?”

“Just _maybe.”_

 

**March 17th 2013**

By St. Patrick’s Day, Jemma and Ward seem to have at least worked out their differences enough that everybody can go out for drinks together. They find some terrible pub to get wasted in while Skye wears just about every article of green clothing that she owns, while Jemma wears that mint dress she wore on the first time she had stopped by Skye’s old apartment and gets pinched a few times as people insist that mint is not actually green enough for the Irish.

“You know I’m actually from the UK, if anybody should know what is or is not green enough for the Irish, surely I’m more qualified than you two.”

“This coming from the girl who thought teal was a shade of a blue,” Skye points out.

“It is!”

“I have never heard a more wrong statement in my life,” Ward, at least agrees with Skye.

Jemma groans, before speaking without thinking and saying, “I wish Fitz were here, _he_ would have agreed with me.”

Skye watches out of the corner of her eye for some sort of reaction from Ward, but he doesn’t even flinch before replying, “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong on that one.”

 

**April 13th 2013**

Fitz is staying with them while he’s back in Boston for some work event and that means that for the first time in their history of living together the fake guest room that had been Jemma’s real room, actually had to be made up for somebody else to sleep there.

This also left Jemma slightly displaced, since Fitz was sleeping in her room.

“You don’t mind sharing with me until he goes back to Florida, right,” Jemma had asked her when the plan was first mentioned, and Skye had been far too eager to jump on the opportunity of sleeping beside Jemma again.

There is something about her very presence that is just incredibly soothing.

Plus she looks cute in those matching flannel pajamas she always insisted upon sleeping in.

The flannel pajamas that she’s wearing now as she lies tucked into half of the bed when Skye finally sneaks in to get some sleep.

She tries to be as stealthy as she can when she sneaks into her side of the bed, as to not disturb Jemma. Still, even the sneakiest of spies could probably not sneak quietly enough to let the queen of light sleepers sleep on.

“Skye,” Jemma mumbles, barely awake.

“Sorry, I was trying to keep quiet, didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“It’s okay,” Jemma answers, rolling over so she can face Skye, her eyes are mostly shut blurry with sleep, but she smiles when Skye slips down into the bed and says, “good night,” in the cutest half-asleep voice Skye has ever heard.

By the time Skye manages to find her voice and reply, “good night,” in return, Jemma’s already back to her dreams.

 

**April 14th 2013**

“So you’re not actually running in the marathon right,” Skye says, when they’re all gathered on the couches eating Chinese takeout. Fitz had spent the last twenty minutes explaining exactly why he was there, something to do with his non-profit group sponsoring athletes or something, but Skye hadn’t really been listening. She had been too distracted by staring at the home screen of Fitz’s laptop which was open on the table, the picture of a young Fitz and Jemma in their Oxford sweaters had been replaced by a candid picture that had once been sent to Skye’s phone in order to prove that Ward actually did have the ability to smile, when caught off guard.

She brushes off the fact that she hadn’t been paying attention, by smirking at Fitz and adding, “because I’ve seen you run and it’s pathetic.”

“Oh Skye, don’t be mean,” Jemma says, pointing her chopsticks at her in what was probably meant to be a threatening manner.

“I’m just saying-”

“I’m not running,” Fitz answers, rather than listening to her explanation, “which you would know if you ever paid attention-”

“I don’t.”

“Which you obviously never do.”

Jemma cuts in before either of them can start riling the other up and says, “Fitz and I are going to go watch the end of the race, if you’re not too busy tomorrow.”

“I have work,” Skye says, because she does, it’s a Monday and unlike other people with flexible schedules or on business trips, people actually expect her to show up to work. Though her answer is also in part because she doesn’t want to be stuck in the middle of the FitzSimmons shenanigans that are quite obviously long overdue, this weekend has been bad enough and he was saying until Tuesday night so she was sure they could use a day to themselves.

She may have considered Jemma to be her best friend, and her wife, but Fitz was her oldest friend and they shared some weird European bond that she could never quite understand.

“Text me how your runners do though, I’ll pretend to be enthusiastic while trapped in my cubicle.”

 

**April 15th 2013**

She’s not sure how she hears the news at first, it’s something over the radio or somebody in the office speaking up, there’s panicked voices and a warning for everybody to stay inside and not to leave the office building.

But Skye can’t think about any of that, she can’t process much anything at all, because it feels as if the floor has disappeared from underneath her feet.

When somebody finally stops and notices that their Tech Support is frozen in the middle of the office room chaos to ask what’s wrong, she feels her lips move of their own accord and says, “Jemma and Fitz went to watch the marathon.”

“What?”

It’s the horror in her coworker’s voice that gets her to snap into action and look up to see Ward standing next to her, there’s absolutely no color in his face and she’s certain she looks much the same.

“He’s supposed to be in Florida.”

“Yeah, well there was something about charity and sponsoring a runner and they invited me to go with them but,” but she was here in her office, safe and sound while who knew what was happening to Jemma. “I need to call her.”

She pulls her phone out of her pocket, punching in the speed dial as quick as she can, praying to every god that she doesn’t believe in that Jemma will be alright, that they’re story won’t have one of those tragic and unhappy endings.

When she looks up to see Ward just standing there still looking horrified and dumbfounded she almost feels angry at him.

“Call him,” she tells Ward, her open phone already ringing as she tries to get ahold of Jemma, “if you care about him at all, if any of that stuff you told me before was true, then this is your moment, you need to call him and make sure he’s safe.”

“It’s none of my business anymore.”

“Fuck that,” Skye snaps, “do you care about him?”

Ward doesn’t hesitate before replying, “yes.”

“Then pick up the fucking phone and call and tell him that.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Yeah, well I do and-” Skye doesn’t finish her sentence because the next second her phone picks up and Jemma’s voice is in her ear. “You’re alive? Please tell me you’re safe and alive.”

“I’m alive. If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be on the phone with you,” Jemma reassures her, but it’s not good enough. Skye is certain the beating in her heart will never subside until she sees Jemma with her own two eyes and can hold her close, knowing that she’s safe. “Skye, sweetheart, I’m fine, we’re fine.”

“I was so afraid that I lost you,” she says, her voice choking up, and she doesn’t even care enough to scrub away the tears that start to fall from her cheeks, “I couldn’t imagine my life without you, and I thought I’d lost you.”

“But you didn’t. I’m here, I’m safe,” Jemma repeats, because this is what Skye needs to hear, “everything is going to be okay.”

 

**April 16th 2013**

She wakes in the middle of the night screaming, her nightmares taking on lives of their own, horror stories where Jemma didn’t come back to her, where she didn’t make it out alright.

But there are hands in the night to steady her, arms that wrap around Skye’s shoulders bringing her back to reality. She can’t make sense of the exact words that Jemma whispers to her, but she can tell from the tone that it’s meant to be reassuring, and slowly Skye feels herself begin to relax.

She leans back into Jemma’s arms reassured that she is there, that the last few hours haven’t just been some sick dream and that everybody she cares about is still alive.

Skye knows she’s shaking, but she can’t help it, even Jemma rubbing her hands against Skye’s arms can’t seem to make the terrors go away.

“I thought I lost you, I dreamed that you died and that,” Skye starts, her eyes burning from the tears already building there.

“You didn’t,” Jemma tells her, “you didn’t. I’m right here, we’re here together, and I promise - I promise I’ll never leave you.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: 
> 
> 1\. This chapter ends in April because I thought this was the best place to end it, assume nothing of significance happens in May, because never chapter will start up in June.   
> 2\. Cars is the worst Pixar movie ever. All other opinions are wrong. This is fact. But really, where do baby cars come from? And what happened to the people? (I watched Planes last night, I do not recommend this thing.)  
> 3\. There's no music referenced in this chapter. I'm not sure what is wrong with me, many apologies.   
> 4\. I should put more decent notes here, but I am lazy.


	7. Year 4

**June 3rd 2013**

She would be lying if she said that it wasn’t a conscious decision that when her phone goes off cryptically reminding her that in one year she needs to ‘water the plants’ she went ahead and deleted the notification for a year from now from her calendar.

Maybe it was something in the air, something in the way over the last month they have come so close together, but Skye knows that this is the year she needs to say something, the moment where she needs to stop being hypocritical and actually make her move.

And she fully intends to do just that.

So she starts that June 3rd off much like she had started off many other’s before it, with a smile and a “good morning,” to the most wonderful woman in the entire world.

 

**June 5th 2013**

Skye overhears somebody mention it during her lunch break, while she and Ward are eating cheap coffee cakes and The Hub.

“Have you ever gone,” she asks Ward, not even pretending not to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.

He doesn’t seem even slightly surprised by how she’s directed the conversation, though he awkwardly answers, “never to the one here.”

“You too cool for Boston,” she teases him.

“Yes,” he says, rolling his eyes at her. She arches an eyebrow at him in return, practically commanding him to go on and after a moment he finally does, “I went to the one in Vegas years ago.”

“Ohh exciting,” Skye giggles, leaning forward, “give me all the details!”

“Yeah. How about no.”

“You’re the worst friend ever.”

 

**June 6th 2013**

“Hey, Jemma, random question,” Skye starts, as they’re washing the dishes after dinner, “what are you doing Saturday?”

“Sleeping in,” Jemma offers, though she’s clearly joking - also sleeping in for Jemma Simmons is waking up at seven instead of six and shouldn’t even be considered sleeping in.

Skye flicks water at her for the sass, and says, “after that, I was thinking if you weren’t busy we could maybe go to the Pride Parade?” She glances over at Jemma in an attempt to try and judge her opinion based off of her facial expression, but Jemma has seemingly frozen the middle of washing dishes, her hands covered in suds, not moving. “I mean - if you’re comfortable with that. Some people were talking about it at The Hub yesterday and I thought it might be fun to go or-”

“I would love to,” Jemma says cutting her off, “I’ve always wanted to go, tried to convince Fitz to go with me a couple of times, but he always had some excuse not to.”

“Awesome, then it’s a date,” Skye says quickly, before “or not a _date,_ but a date. Like a thing that we’re totally doing, this weekend, yeah.”

Jemma laughs at her awkwardness and says, “it’s a date.”

 

**June 8th 2013**

The parade had gone off wonderfully, though Skye had spent much of it watching Jemma’s face rather than focusing on the crowd, because she looked like she was having the time of her life. The woman who had always looked like she belonged in a library or giving a university lecture, seemed to look even more at home among a crowd, holding a sign over her head.

Somehow though, Skye happens to look away, distracted by some flash of light or color and the next thing she knows Jemma’s lost in the crowd. Obviously the easiest way to go about it would be to just call her on her cellphone, but instead Skye finds herself winding through the crowd in order to find her.

She doesn’t find Jemma, but instead she ends up bumping into somebody that she had thought she had seen for the last time years ago in a crowded immigration office.

“Holy shit, I’m so sorry,” is the first thing Skye says, when she knocks into the guy, before realizing who it is and corrects, “holy shit, you’re the douche from the Immigration Office.”

The guy doesn’t seem surprised in slightest by her change of heart just sighs and says, “Jasper Sitwell, and yes, I believe you did look familiar.”

Right, that had been his name.

Not that Skye had particularly cared about his name, at the time all that had been going on; she had been far too focused on convincing him that she and Jemma were the real deal, even when they totally weren’t.

He must have mistaken her silence for confusion because after a second he continues, “I can’t seem to remember your name, but your face is one I very clearly remember, seeing as you stormed out of my office and created quite a fuss.”

“Yeah, I did that,” Skye says, “though to be fair you did accuse me of being a prostitute - which knowing what I know now was probably actually a legitimate question,” she laughs, and when he doesn’t seem to get her reference she says, “it’s a long story. But yeah, I dragged Jemma out of your office with me without ever getting our papers signed or whatever we were there for.”

“That would be it.”

“Sorry about that,” Skye offers, “You know, I could have sworn you were a homophobic jerk.”

“I’ve been told I give off that vibe by a few people,” he admits, which is hard to believe where the guy is currently standing in a rainbow striped shirt.

But really, a suit and tie could change everything about a person’s appearance.

“I’m just surprised you didn’t come after us after that, you know with the whole government employee jurisdiction and kick Jemma out of the country.”

“I suppose that would have been the proper legal thing to do, but I actually ended up signing the papers stating that you two were the real thing after that,” he explains.

“Why?”

“Because any two people that could kiss like that, in a crowded room, are clearly in love with each other.”

 

**August 12th 2013**

They’re driving back from the grocery store with the radio playing in the background, Jemma singing to each and every song that come on with ease, because apparently she knows every song in the world and has trained in opera singing or something.

Skye’s dashboard karaoke is nothing compared to Jemma’s.

As the song breaks off and before another can take its place the radio host comes on talking about the contest they’ve been running this week for two tickets to Saturday's Red Sox/Yankees game. The contest is highly rigged and thoroughly impossible, years ago she had attempted to win one of these by analyzing the sound bites played, but they were all out of order.

Skye honestly didn’t believe that they were even part of a real song, but somehow every year somebody would guess the correct answer without fail, probably some employee of the radio station.

So this time she barely even bothers to listen to the little sound bites that are somehow supposed to make sense to the average listener.

Apparently, the person Skye was married to was far from the average listener, because no sooner does the clip finish before Jemma says, “I know that song,” grabbing her phone off of the dashboard.

“Wait, are you seriously calling in? There was like three notes how can you know which song it was?”

Jemma just scoffs at her and says, “because I have an IQ of 187.”

“Am I supposed to know what that means?”

She looks Skye up and down once before replying, “probably not,” before putting her finger up in a shushing motion as somebody on the other end of the phone picks up. She doesn’t have any sort of preamble just says, “I know that song,” just as she had said to Skye upon first realizing it. “One hundred percent sure,” Jemma says, and they must ask her to hold while the song currently on the radio finishes, because she says, “yes that’s fine,” but pulls a face that only Skye can see.

When it finally does finish, the host comes back on and says, “we have a caller on the line that seems to know what the backwards tune is, let’s get her on the line now.”

It’s weird hearing the echo of Jemma talking into the phone and it playing on the radio, but she manages well enough, “yes, hi, I know that song.”

“That’s lovely; could you tell our listeners your name?”

“I’m Jemma,” she says, clearly not seeing the importance, even as the radio host makes some comment about what a nice name she has.

“Now, Jemma, what do you think the song is?”

“I _know_ that it’s Alone Together, from the new Fall Out Boy album,” Jemma says all in a rush.

There’s a long beat of silence, in which Skye doesn’t even realize she’s holding her breath, until she lets it out as the radio host finally announces, “look at that, you’re right.”

“Damn right I am.”

And Skye’s relatively distracted by the fact that Jemma has somehow won them tickets to one of the most competitive games of the season, but not enough that she doesn’t make an exaggerated stage whisper before asking, “did you just swear, oh my god!”

 

**August 15th 2013**

“I’ve never actually watched a baseball game before,” Jemma admits over breakfast, like it’s a perfectly normal thing for people not to watch baseball, “I don’t even know how the sport is played.”

“Wait, what,” Skye says, stumped, “you never played in gym class as a kid?”

“No,” Jemma replies, “I think it might just be an American thing.”

“I cannot believe you,” she shakes her head, “this is unacceptable. I’m fixing this.”

“Oh Skye.”

 

**August 16th 2013**

They end up at Ward’s apartment, because his TV is bigger and because he has the season pass on his TV subscription, rather than just the basic cable that Skye and Jemma have spent the last few years more than content with. Also when Skye had mentioned at work that Jemma didn’t even know how baseball was played he had insisted upon being there to help educate her, and apologize for setting Skye up with somebody that couldn’t respect the sport, as if that was the only thing that he had to apologize for.

“I support two teams,” Ward explains, when they’re all sitting in his apartment waiting for the game to begin, “the Red Sox and whoever beats the Yankees.”

Skye snorts at him, “you can’t stand football, but baseball is a completely different story.”

“It’s not that I can’t stand football,” he corrects, “it’s that I can’t stand Tom Brady.”

“Right,” she says, with a little laugh, before glancing at Jemma who is still looking at them like they’re speaking a completely different language. “Just buckle in girlie, we’re about to teach you everything in means to be a Red Sox fan in the next few hours.”

“You two are really passionate about this baseball thing,” Jemma says, “you know, if you would rather go with her you could have my ticket?”

“No,” Skye jumps in before Ward can accept, because she can see in his eyes that he wants to, and Jemma has plans for tomorrow night, “you won the tickets so you have to go, _Grant_ here can watch it on his own TV.”

**August 17th 2013**

While the game the night before might have gone badly, their game goes a lot better, well enough that Skye has gone so far as to insist that Jemma might just be their good luck charm, something that the other woman has dismissed as many times as possible.

Though she does flush prettily each time Skye says it, and that might be part of the reason she’s so keen on suggesting it.  

By the time they make it to the eighth inning, everyone is thoroughly pumped and for somebody who knew nothing about baseball and had offered not to go Jemma has gotten surprisingly into it all.

The music comes over the speakers as they switch between the top and bottom of the inning, and having not actually been to a game in person since she was very little Skye had almost forgotten about the little interlude.

But she stands up when the rest of the crowd does, and pulls Jemma to her feet, leaning in close enough to whisper, “sometimes you have to dance like nobody’s watching,” and echo of words she had heard years before come out of Jemma’s lips.

She seems to recognize her own words, for the corner of her lips quirk up a bit, and in a second she’s swaying along with the music and the rest of the crowd, distracting enough that Skye almost forgets to sing.

“Hands, touching hands,” Jemma sings along with the lyrics, her hands seeking Skye’s as she sings along and Skye meets her in the middle, “reaching out touching me, touching you.”

“Oh Sweet Caroline,” Skye joins her in singing, “good times never seemed so good.”

 

**September 8th 2013**

Fitz comes back into town the week of Jemma’s birthday, laden with gifts from Disney World, which is the only reason she doesn’t mind letting him stay in their apartment once more, that and the fact that this will once again mean that Jemma needs to sleep in her room and Skye could get used to something like that.

She could very much get used to that, even if Jemma is always in bed freakishly early and even if she can’t sleep with too many blankets, there’s something about the way she inevitably ends up snuggled against Skye that makes it all worth it.

Waking up with Jemma wrapped around her is quite possibly the best feeling in the world.

Even if that means waking up obscenely early in the morning.

Jemma spends the first few moments waking up trying to take her messy bedhead and insisting that Skye must, “look away, for her own safety.”

Skye can’t help herself from sneaking a peak, her hands covering her eyes, but leaving gaps wide enough for Skye to peak through and watch prim and proper Jemma Simmons put herself back together each and every morning.

It’s a view that she could get used to.

“I thought I told you to look away, not squint at me in a terribly obvious fashion.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Skye replies, in a tone of faux-innocence.

“Of course you don’t,” Jemma replies back, before grabbing her pillow and playfully attempting to smother Skye with it.

Luckily she’s a master pillow dodger.

 

**September 10th 2013**

They had been planning this since as soon as Fitz had accepted their invitation to come and stay in Boston for Jemma’s birthday week, but executing the plan had still somehow manages to make Skye a bit nervous.

Which was saying something, because she wasn’t the nervous type, that was supposed to be Jemma’s job.

“What is this?”

“A blind date,” Jemma says, at the same time that Skye answers, “an intervention.”

There’s a moment where nobody says anything, the guys still in some mix of shock, Jemma looking adorably confused, and Skye barely hanging on her the laughter that seems to want to bubble over and fill the silence.

Finally, Fitz asks, “why?”

“Because,” Skye says, donning the most authoritative tone she can manage, “I’m sick of listening to Jemma on the phone every night pretending she’s surprised when you ask how he’s doing,” she then turns towards Ward, “and I’m tired of you pretending to be faux-casual in asking if we’ve heard from Fitz almost every time I get lunch with you.”

“It’s obvious you both still care about each other,” Jemma says, kinder in tone in a way that Skye could never seem to manage, “and we had thought, well, things hadn’t worked out before, because of certain _circumstances_ ,” which was an interesting way to put things, “but perhaps had you met under different circumstances things could have worked out-”

“Which is why,” Skye continues for her, “we decided to set our two close friends up on a blind date. So let’s start over.”

She nods her head once, and Jemma follows in suit.

“This is my friend from work, Ward,” she starts, and when he fails to respond she pokes at him, “introduce yourself.”

The eye roll she gets in return is legendary and a massive expression of emotions from the complete dork that is Grant Ward, but he manages to give a lame, “hey,” as a response, so she lets it slide.

“And this is my old uni buddy, Fitz,” Jemma says.

“This is stupid-”

“Fitz, play nice,” she scolds, “sorry about him, he’s normally far better behaved.”

Fitz groans before finally saying, “hello,” like it’s the most difficult word in the world.

“That’s a good start,” Skye says, even though both guys are being stubborn idiots are far from cooperative, “now play nice and act like normal human beings.”

“Please just make enough peace that we can all get drinks together tomorrow for my birthday,” Jemma begs, “everything else is negotiable.”

“Though more is certainly encouraged,” Skye moves over to lace her arm through Jemma’s, “we’ll be back in an hour.”

 

**September 11th 2013**

“Have you ever done a blowjob shot?”

“No,” Jemma says, “and I don’t intend to!”

“I have,” Fitz announces with far too much pride, and Skye snorts into her drink when she notices Ward’s horrified and slightly embarrassed look.

It’s good to have the gang back together again.

 

**October 21st 2013**

“Quiz me,” Jemma insists, tossing the flashcards of facts every American should apparently know onto Skye’s lap.

They’ve gone through these plenty of times before, and she knows that Jemma already knows all of these facts far too well, but she humors her, picking one out at random and asks, “twenty-sixth president?”

“Roosevelt.”

“Which one?”

That gives Jemma a bit of pause, though it’s only a moment before she responds, “Theodore?”

“Correct!”

 

**November 1st 2013**

She wakes up in the morning to see an email from somebody she hasn’t talked to in a long while, it’s in code and she spends much of her morning decoding it rather than doing anything productive for work.

When she eventually decodes it she feels a mix of horror and excitement, until she realizes the date that everything is planned for.

She calls him up during her lunch break, ignoring the smug little, and “missed you too.”

“You do realize that’s my anniversary right?”

“With your fake wife,” Miles reminds her, “look Skye, not my fault you guys got married on the day that is a hacktivists dream day, now are you in or not?”

“I’m not into that stuff anymore,” Skye says, but she knows it’s a lie, her fingers are itching for the key of her keyboard and she hates herself for wanting it so badly.

“That’s not a yes or a no answer,” he points out.

And she knows it’s not that was sort of the point, “I’ll think about it.”

 

**November 5th 2013**

“Sorry, Jem, I’m really caught up with this thing at work,” she lies into the phone, hating herself for doing this, because she’s sure Jemma has something amazing planned - seeing as Jemma always plans the most amazing things, “I’ll make it up to you.”

“It’s alright,” Jemma says on the other end of the line, and Skye’s not sure if it’s her phone connection or if she is actually as disappointed as her voice sounds.

“Okay, uh, I’ll see you later tonight or something yeah, I gotta go,” she says, and when Jemma replies to have a good night, Skye snaps the phone shut before she can regret it even more.

“Lying to the missus, very classy,” Miles remarks from the other side of the room, not looking up from his computer screen. If they weren’t in a room full of other hackers she probably would have hit him for that.

Luckily he was too far away for her to do more than say, “go fuck yourself,” before getting back to her own hacking.

 

**November 7th 2013**

“I submitted my application for citizenship this morning,” Jemma mentions as they’re getting ready for bed, sharing the bathroom’s mirror for their various nighttime rituals.

“That’s exciting,” Skye says, not sure why as she says the words, she begins to feel the exact opposite.

“Yes, I suppose it is _exciting._ ”

 

**December 13th 2013**

They’re having a celebration in honor of Jemma officially becoming a citizen, it’s nothing as crazy as the party they through for Fitz years before, instead it’s just Skye and Jemma in their apartment with a bottle of red wine, but that feels like enough of a party for her.

“So now that you’re officially a citizen of the best country in the world,” Skye says, tilting the wine bottle to Jemma like it’s a microphone, “what are you planning to do with yourself?”

“I believe the stereotypical American answer to this question would be,” Jemma pauses for dramatic effect; “I’m going to Disneyworld!”

“Ohh visiting Fitz for Christmas actually sounds like an amazing plan?”

“No no no,” Jemma shakes her head, “though I did have an idea about what to do for Christmas.”

“Yeah?

“Since as you know I’m officially a citizen now, I can technically leave the country once more,” Jemma says, “I talked to my parents the other day, and they invited us over to London for the holidays. Assuming you were interested in that sort of thing?”

Skye had only ever been out of the country once before and that was to go to Canada, the idea of going to somewhere like London had never even occurred to her, even though that was where Jemma called home.

“It would just be from the twenty-third till just after New Year’s, and you’d have to take a little time off work, so I know it might not be the best idea, but-”

“I’d love to.”

Jemma lights up at that, flinging her arms around Skye to pull her into a big hug and knocking the bottle of the wine onto the floor all in one motion.

Not that Skye is about to pay any attention to spilled wine when Jemma is holding her tight.

 

**December 23rd 2013**

“Have you ever thought about how the whole world looks so small from the sky,” she asks, staring down out the window as their plane takes off.

“Scientifically speaking or emotionally speaking?”

Only Jemma would think to ask that sort of question, like it was a normal inquiry.

“I used to play those SimCity games as a kid,” Skye continues, ignoring Jemma’s question, “it sort of looks like those.”

“You say that like you’ve never been on a plane before,” Jemma comments.

“Oh, yeah, I haven’t - first time for everything I guess.”

 

**December 24th 2013**

It’s Christmas Eve and she can’t sleep.

She’s not sure if has something to do with the fact that she has major jet lag from the flight over, Jemma’s parents clear disinterest in Skye and insistence upon asking her for any news she might have had about Fitz, or the glow in the dark stars taped up onto the ceiling that shine down on her.

It’s probably the stars; they’re damn bright for little glowy things.

Skye squints her eyes up at them wishing there was a way to turn them off, because apparently they didn’t bother Jemma at all, seeing as she had been sleeping for ease for the last hour beside Skye.

Their proximity was probably another factor in her ability to sleep, seeing as it provided Skye with the realization that she was lying in Jemma’s childhood bedroom with her staring up at glowing stars on the ceiling.

At least, she had thought Jemma was asleep, until a light voice mumbles, “go to sleep, Skye.”

“Sorry, I didn’t wake you up did I?”

Jemma says something that Skye can’t quite make out, before her arms come out to pull Skye in towards her chest, “just go to sleep.”

Skye laughs against Jemma’s chest, being taller than her makes the position a bit awkwardly cramped, but she somehow manages and says, “you went through a weird space phase as a kid, didn’t you?”

Jemma groans, but finally says, “I wanted to be a xenobiologist.”

“A what?”

She wishes that she could Jemma’s face, because just from her tone of voice Skye can tell that she’s blushing, “aliens. I wanted to study aliens.”

Skye does her best to stifle her laughter before replying, “you’re such a nerd.”

“Shut up and go to sleep.”

 

**December 28th 2013**

Once their obligations for Christmas are over and before New Year’s rolls around the end up with some time for themselves, time that Skye demands be spent being as tourist-like as possible in the city that Jemma had grown up in.

And for some reason, Jemma doesn’t refuse her demands; instead she takes Skye’s hand and shows her the best way to do it all.

 

**January 1st 2014**

It hardly feels like New Year’s when they celebrate the clock counting down, maybe it’s because there’s no big ball being dropped or because she’s still wide away, but Skye feels completely wired.

She makes a New Year’s resolution standing in the middle of some party hosted by an old Uni buddy of Jemma’s that Skye hadn’t even bothered to meet, that this year, she’s going to do it - she’s going to tell Jemma exactly how she feels.

And with a little liquid courage in her veins she sets off in search of her.

Finding Jemma is an easy enough task, it’s getting her mouth to catch up with her mind that’s a bit more difficult, but finally she manages to get out, “I kind of want to kiss you.”

“Me too,” Jemma says, nodding her head with a silly grin, “we could totally do that.”

“Wait, did you just agree-” before Skye can even finish her question Jemma follows through with her words, her lips taste like red wine, but its sweet and Skye kisses her back instinctively.

What had just been meant as a playful kiss develops all at once, and Skye’s not sure when they went from teasing each other to full on making out, but it’s a progression that Skye has been waiting for for far too long, and this finally feels like the right moment.

After a moment her hands catch up with the rest of her and she moves them quickly forward to grab ahold of Jemma, occupying her hands with mapping out every inch of Jemma’s skin, her touch making the woman beside her let out little gasps between kisses.

It goes on like that for some time, until Jemma abruptly pulls back and says, “we shouldn’t. I shouldn’t - I’m taking advantage of you and-”

“I want this,” Skye says cutting her off, “I’ve wanted this for a long time, I just haven’t known how to-”

“Really?”

“Yeah, one hundred percent.”

She means to keep reassuring Jemma, but Jemma apparently doesn’t need any more than that because she’s kissing Skye back and it’s exactly as wonderful as she’s imagined.

It only took them nearly four years to make it this far, but it feels incredibly right.

And if this was where her story ended, Skye would be perfectly alright with that, because things have finally gone right.

 

**January 3rd 2014**

“So I’ve never actually had a girlfriend before-”

“I’m having the weirdest sense of Deja vu right now,” Jemma remarks with a coy smiles.

“Yes, but this time I mean in it the super romantic manner that you’re assuming.”

“Ah, is that what I was assuming?”

“It most certainly was,” Skye says poking at her until she giggles and swats Skye’s hands away, “like I was saying, I’ve never had a girlfriend before, so you might have to walk me through things and I’ll probably fuck up a lot.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you don’t have a girlfriend then.”

“I don’t,” Skye says, a cold feeling growing in the pit of her stomach, because technically they did make out on New Year’s, but that might not actually mean as much as she thought it did, and if Jemma didn’t think that this was super serious then Skye wasn’t sure what she would do.

“You don’t,” Jemma informs her, but she’s smiling not frowning and incredibly hard to read, until she adds, “we’re married remember, we skipped the whole awkward first date thing and jump straight to the ceremony.”

“Yeah, we sort of did, didn’t we?”

 

**January 20th 2014**

She kisses Jemma when they’re in the middle of making dinner, because she can, because there’s nothing stopping her from kissing her whenever Skye damn well feels like it, and she feels like it quite a lot.

That’s the problem with people like Jemma Simmons, they’re meant to be kissed, to have people fall hopelessly in love with them, and Skye - well, she’s always been the sort of person to fall.

She’s just happy to find that for once she has somebody to catch her when she falls.

 

**February 14th 2014**

The university that Jemma sort of works for is holding some sort of Valentine’s Day party for scientists. At least Skye thinks it was supposed to be a party, they have a band and there’s a sadly unspiked punch bowl, but she’s pretty sure somebody had called it a party, because all of the professors and doctors were dressed up and talking about things way over Skye’s head, which admittedly was probably their best idea of a party.

For Skye it was a snooze fest, the only thing that made up for it at all was the fact that with every new doctor or professor that Jemma talked to, she would make sure to introduce Skye to them as ‘her wife.’

The warm feeling that spreads through her each time Jemma says those words is enough to make up for all of the boringness that the party actually is turning out to be.

She’s not listening to whatever science mumbo jumbo Jemma is talking to this Dr Banner guy about, instead as her attention wanders her eyes settle upon the empty dance floor that somebody had set up with some strange inclination to believe a bunch of dorky scientists might want to dance.

The band is playing some acoustic Elton John cover and Skye has had just enough of sitting around waiting for something exciting to happen.

“Excuse me doctors,” Skye says, grabbing Jemma’s song, “I just realize, that they’re playing our song and I need to dance with my wife.”

“This isn’t,” Jemma starts, but Skye shushes, her pulling her away from the scientists, and instead leading her out into the middle of the dance floor. “Skye, we can’t dance to do this.”

“Now, I seem to remember somebody telling me once that any song can be danced to.”

“Don’t use my words against me,” Jemma starts, but she does smile slightly as Skye rests her fingers against her waist and begins to sway slightly to the music.

“Jem, just go with it,” she says, leaning her head against her shoulder and finally she feels the tension in her relax.

And when the little band starts up the next verse, she hears Jemma echo them in a voice that is only for Skye’s ears, “and I think it’s gonna be a long long time.”

 

**February 28th 2014**

She runs into him getting coffee and groans, “I’m not helping you with any hacking thing.”

“Missed you too,” he replies, knowing that she hates it, before launching into an explanation of his latest project without any prompting with her, and Skye does her best to pretend she’s not interested, because while exposing government secrets sounds amazing, things are going well in her life right now and she’s not about to mess that up.

“I really can’t,” she tells him, “as much as I would like to, I can’t.”

“Fake missus keeping you too busy,” Miles asks, arching an eyebrow at her.

“Actually we’re together for real now.”

He looks a bit surprised at that, before smiling like he’s actually happy for her, which seems a bit too hard to believe, “I’m happy for you.”

“Really,” she asks skeptically.

And she watches as his grin slips from supportive to mischievous in a blink of an eye before he replies, “yeah, you needed to get laid, sad it’s not me, but hey - at least, the attitude problem is fixed.”

“Fuck you, Miles.”

“Hey, if the wifey is down for threesomes, count me in!”

She hits him upside the head before walking away and feels oddly accomplished with the whole thing.

 

**March 14th 2014**

Their date nights have become real dates, and it feels like an unbelievably natural progression.

They buy apple pie at a local bakery and share a fork, knees bumping under the table as they let out little breathless giggles that seem so much more important than any words Skye could have dreamed of saying.

She kisses her with the taste of apple pie still on her lips and loves the flavor.

**April 18th 2014**

When Jemma asks her what she wants for her birthday, she almost feels silly saying the words, but she’s thought about it for so long, dreamed about it that if there’s a chance it could happen for real she has to ask.

Jemma seems slightly surprised, before she smiles like she’s just won the lottery and says, “oh Skye, I can definitely do that.”

“I mean - I’ve never done this before, with a woman, so I’m not exactly sure how everything-” she mumbles until Jemma silences her with a kiss.

Kissing is easy, Skye’s good with kissing, it’s the stuff that comes after that, the feel of Jemma’s cold fingers brushing against the skin of her stomach as she helps Skye rid herself of her shirt, that gets her all nervous.

When Jemma manages to get Skye’s bra off with ease she finds herself laughing and maybe a bit jealous when she says, “you’ve had practice.”

“Yeah,” Jemma laughs back, her lips against the skin of Skye’s neck as she does so, “every day and every night as I take my own on and off.”

“What else do you have practice with,” Skye finds herself asking in what she had intended to be a coy manner, but actually comes off in a far more nervous fashion.

Jemma, the more knowledgeable one in their situation smirks, before moving upwards to snag Skye’s lips with her own, and says, “you’ll just have to wait and see.”

And she does, oh she does, and waiting seems to be the worst possible thing in the world when she has Jemma’s hands and mouth on her, waiting is something that almost seems impossible, when she’s so close to exactly what she needs.  

Lying there afterwards, she can’t help herself from feeling like this was the best birthday that she ever had by far.

It’s when they’re lying there in the dark of the night that Jemma says, “I love you.”

And Skye really intends to return it at the time, but sleep creeps in on her before she can, and the words hang in the air and empty echo that rests into the pit of her soul.

 

**April 19th 2014**

It’s the next morning when her thoughts catch up with her, when she realizes what exactly they did the night before, and how it makes her feel so excited and happy and yet nervous at the exact same time.

And she knows she’s being a coward when she slinks out of Jemma’s room before the other woman can wake up, but she needs to think, she needs to clear her mind and let everything sort of settle.

Which is why she finds herself hours later in the very park that Jemma proposed to her sitting on a bench watching the world go by and trying to convince herself that the events of the night before were more than just a drunken dream, that they really happened, and that they both wanted that.

She did, she really did want that.

It was just the matter of where to go from there that stumped Skye.

After what feels like hours later, somebody finally settles onto the other side of the bench beside her and Skye doesn’t even have to look up to know who it is sitting there. Her soft sigh gives it all away and makes Skye feel even more guilty for running away.

“I’m sorry,” Skye starts up at once, “I just couldn’t - I don’t,” but she can’t seem to finish the sentence, and the words stick in her throat.

“It’s okay, I think I understand,” Jemma says slowly, and she doesn’t understand, she won’t understand unless Skye says something, but she can’t make her mouth work. “You weren’t comfortable with everything and I knew you were just experimenting, in the back of my mind I knew that, but I let myself get ahead of things.”

That’s not it at all, it’s really not. Skye knows she should stop her from assuming the worst, she should correct all her terrible assumptions, but instead she just mumbles, “yeah.”

Jemma makes an almost wounded noise and Skye can’t get the nerve to look up at her and see her face. “I don’t want things to be awkward between us,” Jemma says, and Skye can’t tell if her voice really sounds that close to breaking or if it’s just her imagination, “perhaps it might be best if we just go back to being friends. I really liked being your friend Skye, and I don’t want to lose that because I rushed things and you weren’t interested.”

“We can be friends, yeah,” Skye replies, even though she feels like she’s being broken up with and it sucks, because this is the exact opposite of how she wanted this conversation to go.

But Jemma makes a sort of nod and says, “oh okay good,” before pushing herself off of the bench and dusting off her dress, “I guess, I’ll see you back at the apartment.”

Skye makes some noncommittal noise, but it works enough that Jemma leaves her there on that bench.

She doesn’t even realize she’s crying until probably an hour later Ward shows up and picks her up off the bench his fingers helping to brush the tears off her cheeks, before pulling her into a hug that she so desperately needed.

“I fucked everything up,” she mumbles into his chest, “I fucked everything up without even meaning to.”

 

**April 20th 2014**

She spends the night in the guest room that had been her home back years before when she had first met two idiots at a dog shelter, she lays in the empty bed and realizes this is where it all began, this is who she has to blame for getting her into this mess in the first place.

She tells Ward exactly that as he makes her breakfast the next morning.

“You know,” he says, when she’s finished her rant, “Leo and I set you two up not just because you needed money and Jemma needed a fake spouse, but because we realized that we had two friends who had never met each other and yet, if they both gave it a chance could have the potential to be perfect for each other.”

“So what you guys were playing some sort of matchmaker nonsense?”

“That was the plan,” he admits, “and it worked for a while, but-”

“Don’t tell me that not every story has a happy ending, because I’ve heard it enough. And I know, I had my happy ending right there, only to lose it.”

“Yes, however, somebody once told me that waiting can have desirable after effects.”

“That was me, you idiot,” Skye points out, before sighing, “And anyways I did my waiting, but look where that got me, first time we hook up we end up breaking up the next morning.”

Whatever she says must have come as some sort of shock to Ward, because he stops in the middle of eating his oversized plate of breakfast food to look at her with a completely confused look, “wait, you’re telling me you’ve been married for three years and _this_ was the first time you two had sex?”

“Yes,” Skye admits, before taking in his still shocked expression and continuing, “what like you and Fitz were hooking up the whole- oh my god you were, weren’t you?”

“Did you miss the ‘I used to be a male prostitute’ discussion we had a while ago?”

“Holy shit, holy shit,” Skye says, “I knew you guys weren’t faking things! Oh my god! I lived in this house! You guys probably had sex while I was in the next room - and don’t you dare wiggle your eyebrows at me! This changes my entire perspective on everything.”

“You know oddly enough I feel the same way right now,” Ward admits, “I could have sworn you and Simmons were actually together since at least two summers ago. I had assumed you started up officially after you finished your downward spiral after turning twenty-one.”

“Downward spiral is a bit harsh.”

“You came into work hungover more times than I could count.”

“This coming from the prostitute.”

“How is that even relevant?”

“It is,” Skye insists, “because, I - because I am in love with my wife and unable to say it when I should have and now she thinks this was all a mistake and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Tell her that,” Ward insists, “tell her what you just said before you lose your chance.”

She looks up at him about to call him a hypocritical asshole, because she remembers having given this exact advice before, but there’s some sort of deep understanding and regret there and she knows it’s a sign.

“Trust me, just do that, before it’s too late and you lose your chance.”

 

**May 31st 2014**

At some point she had always meant to say something, she had meant to say something to Jemma, to tell her that she had gotten everything all wrong, that Skye hadn’t meant things to go that way - but April had become May and she never managed to get the words out.

Instead they tiptoed around each other, the air of the apartment feeling awkward and stifling on its good days, to the point where Skye found herself spending more and more time at the office or just somewhere other than their apartment.

Even when she was home, it seemed that Jemma was keeping herself busy as well with her work and research.

For that last month, it felt as if they weren’t even living together, as if she was a ghost walking through the halls of their lives.

And even though Skye knew all she had to do was stop one day and say something, admit to everything she’s felt, that it was real.

She just needs to say those three words.

To tell Jemma that she loves her too.

And yet, when the sunsets on the month of May, she realizes she’s never managed to take the best advice ever given to her.

Because it’s finally become too late.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:
> 
> 1\. So this chapter ends with the date we don't see which is June 3rd 2014 - which if you remember is the prologue chapter for this fic.  
> 2\. The songs in this chapter are: Alone Together, Sweet Caroline, and Rocket Man.  
> 3\. I have a shirt that says: "I support two teams, the Red Sox and whoever beats the Yankees" - I imagine Ward has one as well. (Also he hates Tom Brady in canon, but doesn't mean he can't be a baseball fan!)  
> 4\. This end hurt me to write as much as it probably hurt you to read.  
> 5\. I have to many emotions to make proper notes right now - excuses excuses I know, forgive me.


	8. Borrowed Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So as you may or may not know, I'm kind of on a road trip right now! And by some miracle the hotel I'm staying at tonight has decent enough wifi for me to upload this chapter - so enjoy! 
> 
> Also the other day I made a playlist for the fic, which you can find [here](http://plinys.tumblr.com/post/89070709055/i-made-a-mixtape-for-you-of-all-the-songs-you), and it includes all of the songs used in this fic! (With a tiny spoiler for this chapter in form of a song referenced at some point!)

June 3rd 2014

Part of her foolishly hopes that if she stares at them long enough they will go away. That if she keeps looking at it somehow this will all become a dream and she will wake up back in her bed with Jemma curled beside her, and that this day will be just like so many others before it.

Except its not, and the paper’s don’t go away, no matter how long she stares at them they’re still there.

Her eyes blur, the tears that she had been doing her best to restrain finally falling onto the tabletop and in that moment she loses the final bit of control she has.

She doesn’t go into work that day, can’t manage to pull herself from the apartment, instead she takes the papers back with her into her room, pulls the covers over her head and pretends she’s not still holding onto the small hope that if she squeezes her eyes shut tight enough all of this will go away.

 

June 6th 2014

They’re supposed to meet with the lawyers tomorrow; at least that’s what the email Jemma sends her says, because that’s how they’re communicating now _email._ As if the last few years of living together, of being married, have been nothing more than the business contract that Ward had once tries to call it.

By her fourth beer, she can’t even see straight enough to read Jemma’s email, but that doesn’t make it any less there and less true.

She calls Ward up as she opens her fifth drink, her laptop abandoned in the process, because alcohol and crying had made it difficult to stare at the lit up screen.

He thankfully picks up on the second ring, though beats her to speaking and says, “where the hell have you been all week?”

“Vacation,” Skye offers, though it’s a shitty answer, “and fuck you, that’s not why I called!”

“Coulson’s going to fire you if you don’t show up on Monday with a decent excuse; you do realize that, don’t you?”

A decent excuse.

She wonders how her boss would take it if she told him the truth, that her fake wife was divorcing her and Skye wasn’t okay with that.

Maybe she should just stick with the divorce thing, which reminded her, “I hate you,” Skye says into the phone, “I hate you, and I hate Fitz too but I’m too drunk to remember his number.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because it’s your fault I got into this mess. I was happy being a computer hacker with no life goals and living out of my van, but you two had to be so fucking nice and offer me a place to stay and then introduce me to her and set all of this up,” Skye says, her words sounding more like a jumble than any sense, but it’s a bit hard to think straight, “and now I have to meet with some lawyers tomorrow, because Jemma emailed me, couldn’t even fucking talk to me. Guess since she sort of moved out, that makes sense but-”

“Skye, slow down you’re not making any sense.”

“Jemma’s divorcing me,” Skye says far too loudly into the phone, “I’m in love with her and she’s divorcing me.”

 

June 7th 2014

Ward gave her the number of some fancy lawyer friend of his the night before, and Skye vaguely remembered leaving a drunken voicemail on her firm’s answering machine, but she had not actually expected that somebody would show up the next day to represent her.

However, when Skye arrives at the location Jemma had emailed her there’s a woman in a finely pressed black suit who introduces herself as May and says that she will be representing her as a favor to an old friend.

Skye’s always been a bit mistrustful of lawyers and she has no real clue what to expect of the whole thing, but when their initial meeting wraps up, Skye seems to have the weirdest feeling that she should be thanking Ward for referring her.

It’s as they’re walking out the door that she allows her gaze to linger on Jemma’s retreating form, trying to find some way to read her, some way to comprehend all of this.

She doesn’t come up with any answers, but she does draw the attention of her lawyer, who stops to stand beside her once Jemma and hers have left their meeting room.

“Did you and this girl have a thing like Grant and his friend did,” May asks.

Skye’s a bit surprised by the question that it takes her a second before she says, “yeah, sort of.”

“Sort of,” the woman repeats the word with careful inflection.

“I kind of realized I actually had feelings for her too late to do anything and then screwed it all up,” Skye explains, opening up far more than she probably should to somebody that she had just met. Especially somebody with a job that Skye would normally label as corrupt and evil. “I just wish I had more time to sort things out but, now we have this and-”

“I can give you more time,” May cuts her off, “I have a way of making things unnecessarily difficult when I want to.”

“That would actually be amazing,” she replies, a bit breathless.

May nods once, having no further comment on things and head from the room, leaving Skye to follow behind her a moment later.

She catches up to her at the elevator, because wow does this woman have long strides for somebody about a head shorter than Skye. That would be impressive if she weren’t so distracted by everything else in her life being a mess.

However, even with all the distractions there was one thing she couldn’t have missed even if she had tried.

“You must have been close,” Skye says as they’re waiting for the elevator to descend, “you and Ward, because I’ve never actually heard anybody other than Fitz call him by his first name in a non-teasing manner.”

“We were, before.”

“So did you go to school together or,” Skye asks, trying to get some read off of the other woman, but getting nothing before finally asking, “Vegas?”

“Vegas.”

 

June 12th 2014

“Tell me honestly, does this get any easier?

“In my experience, no.”

 

June 17th 2014

“Sorry, I don’t mean to barge in like this,” Jemma is standing in her doorway like it’s absolutely no big deal, like she’s a guest in the apartment that they had lived in together for the last three years. “I had forgotten some things when I moved out before, I was all in a bit of a rush and if it wouldn’t be terribly inconvenient I was wondering if I could come in and get those things.”

“Which things,” Skye asks, because her brain hasn’t exactly rebooted from the initial shock of seeing Jemma sitting outside of the apartment when she got home from work. Skye had sort of forgotten that Jemma had given Skye her key to the apartment after their last meeting with the lawyers.

“The things that I’ve forgotten.”

“Uh, if you just tell me what they are I can grab them for you,” she offers as she puts her key into the lock and jams it forward and to the left in order to get the lock to click.

“No, really its fine I don’t mind going in and getting them myself,” Jemma insists, vaguely.

And it’s not that Skye doesn’t want her in the apartment, except she doesn’t.

It’s not just the little bit of mess that has gathered in the time that Skye had been living on her own, but it’s the fact that seeing Jemma inside there will make it seem too much like old times, too much like the times that Skye can only see in her dreams now.

Which is why when she whirls around to tell Jemma that she really needn’t come in, she finds herself face to face with the other woman and her words freeze in her throat.

They’re mere inches away, both a bit shocked by the sudden proximity and it hits Skye that months before this she would have been able to simply lean forward and kiss Jemma, now though she can’t, no matter how much she yearns to close the mere centimeters of distance between them she can’t.

So with that thought in mind she finally jerks backward, the back of her head colliding with the frame of their front door, startling the slightly dazed look out of Jemma’s eyes, and bringing everything crashing back down to the present all in one motion.

 

June 28th 2014

“Your lawyer is a bitch,” Jemma tells her in no uncertain terms when they break for lunch after their latest rounds of going through the divorce contract.

“Jemma Simmons cursing, I never thought I’d see the day,” Skye says in a voice that was supposed to be sarcastic, but comes off far weaker than she intends.

“It’s true you know,” she continues on, as if Skye had said nothing at all, “she’s making things far too complicated, we should have been signing the papers today not debating every last article.”

Her voice comes out more biting the second time she speaks, though the effort it takes to make it sound so leaves Skye feeling hollow on the inside, “I’m sorry it’s so difficult for you to get out of your divorce to your fake wife.”

Jemma’s face scrunches up like she’s been slapped, her eyes narrowing at Skye before she finally replies, “maybe it’s not just your lawyer that’s being a bitch.”

 

June 29th 2014

“I’m getting a divorce and I need you to fuck me until I forget all about that,” Skye says as soon as he opens his door.

Miles is half-asleep, wearing only a pair of boxers which sink low on his lips, hair messed up. He looks her up and down once before replying, “missed you-” but she doesn’t let him finish the sentence before she’s crossed the distance between them pressing herself to him with desperate urgency, because she needs something to help her forget about all of this and he’s the closest thing she has to that.

He complies easily enough, hands already moving to her hips, helping to pull her shirt off and over her head, before kissing her again.

Usually this work, in every other shitty moment of her life coming back to Miles has been the one thing to help her forget about whatever it is that’s bothering her for at least a few useless minutes.

This time though, as he kisses her back she feels an emptiness, nothing comes from it.

And when she pulls back all too soon he doesn’t even look slightly surprised.

Skye only realizes she’s crying when his hand comes up to help wipe the tears away from her cheeks, and then all at once it’s as if the emotions she had been trying to hold in for so long finally escape and she’s crying in earnest.

“You know, normally when there’s a girl in my apartment crying in her bra, it’s my fault,” Miles says with a sad little grin.

And in spite of herself she finds herself mirror in weak attempt at a smile, “I’m getting divorced.”

“Yeah you vaguely mentioned that before you attacked me,” he points out, before pulling her into a hug that’s nothing more than friendly. “Look how about I make you midnight waffles and we talk about it?”

 

June 30th 2014

It ends up being around one by time Miles has finally managed to find waffles and make them. He’s almost made eggs and bacon, because apparently he’s the sort of person that goes all out when it comes to breakfast at midnight and comforting friends.

“I’m not one to judge or offer any advice, so feel free to ignore all of this,” he says as he piles slightly over charred bacon onto her place, “but when I saw you months ago at the Hub you looked happier than you’ve ever been before. I like you Skye, a fucking lot, have for a damn long while. But never once had you talked to be with the light in your eyes that you had that day except when you talked about that woman.”

“I-”

“I’m not finished,” Miles continues, cutting her off with a sharp look, “I don’t care if she was your fake wife or whatever, but you were happy and I’ve always just wanted you to be happy. I don’t know what you did, what she did, or whatever, but sometimes fixing things is better than just letting them die.”

“What do you know about fixing things?”

“Nothing,” he admits, with a laugh, crunching his piece of bacon with his fork like a weirdo, “but nothing is more than you know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just eat your bacon, while I work out a plan for you.”

 

July 14th 2014

Coulson calls her in for a meeting because her work productivity has dropped and Skye can already hear his voice in the back of her head telling her that she’s been fired, just one more thing Skye needs to officially make these the worst few months of her life.

Her whole body feels fatigued as she sits down in the plush leather chair in his office, wishing the cushions could suck her in and take her to another dimension where things didn’t suck quite this bad.

“I just want to talk to you,” he says, in a calm reassuring voice, “things have been rough for you lately, I know you and I know that you’re upset-”

“You have no idea.”

“No, I don’t,” he admits, “I tried to think about it once, what it would be like to lose Audrey and I cannot imagine it. I cannot begin to imagine what you must be feeling right now.”

“Yeah well, it’s not every day you end up in a situation like mine,” she says bitterly.

“Actually the percentage of couples who get divorced is-”

“But we’re not like them,” Skye insists, and she know she shouldn’t say it, but at this point they’re so close to everything being over that she finds she doesn’t care. “Jemma married me to get a green card. For the first three years of our marriage, we were just friends and everything was like a business transaction or whatever, but then I kissed her on New Year’s or maybe she kissed me, and I think I’m in love with her. No, I know I am. I’m in love with the woman trying to get a divorce from me, but she doesn’t know that - and that’s why she’s doing this, because she told me she loved me and I didn’t say it back and now she thinks that I don’t feel the same, but I do. I don’t want to lose her, but I don’t know how to stop this.”

“That is quite a conundrum,” Coulson admits when she’s finally finished her rant.   

“Yeah well,” Skye huffs, “guess that changes your perspective on things, huh? Cause you didn’t know it, but my marriage was a sham.”

“I actually knew that.”

“You did,” Skye asks, suddenly more shocked than she should, because how in the world could Coulson know. She and Jemma had kept everything so tightly locked down.

“I had a hunch,” he corrects, “I knew that Ward and his husband were in that situation, they accidently let it slip years before. I had factored in that since you two were close there was a possibility of the same situation existing.”

“Yeah, we have a secret club,” Skye says sarcastically, “of people willing to marry foreigners for cash.”  

“Oh I don’t think it’s exactly like that.”

“I mean technically no, but-”

“When you two came over for Thanksgiving that one year, I had my suspicions about you, but there was such obvious love there that I felt wrong believing otherwise.”

“But that was,” Skye pauses as she tries to figure out how long ago that had been, Skye had just been sorting out her feelings then, and she  had been so certain that Jemma had felt none of the same things.

“That was real then.”

 

July 23rd 2014

“What are you listening to,” Ward asks, perching himself on her desk, “because it sounds depressing and awful.”

Skye flips him off without lifting her head off the top of her desk, “it’s my _I’m getting a divorce_ playlist.”

“It’s depressing,” he corrects, shifting over so that he can fiddle with her iTunes.

“That’s kind of the point,” she points out.

Not that Ward is even listening to her; instead he tries to take control of her laptop and the playlist. That’s enough to stir Skye into action and in a second she’s up off the top of her desk, and instead grabbing at her computer protectively.

“Don’t you have anything upbeat on here,” he says, “your negative vibes are killing my productivity.”

“It’s your cubicle on the other side of the office,” she points out, but complies with his demands searching for a song that could fill his requirements and hers at the same time.

“It might be.”

She snorts at him, but presses a button on the computer, “here, be happy.”

For the first few measures of background music it sounds almost upbeat and Skye sighs softly not moving from her position. Though once the singer begins to sing and the lyrics pick up she can actually hear Ward’s groan.

Though she’s too busy singing along quietly asking, “what good is a love song without the love,” to care what he’s doing with the computer.

She only notices when the song stops because her voices cares on softly without the background noise for a moment, before he cuts her off to ask, “How long do you plan on staying miserable and sorry for yourself?”

“Three more weeks, at least.”

 

August 2nd 2014

May has stalled for Skye as long as she could, and really Skye appreciates the other woman’s help.

She’s given Skye an opportunity to stare at Jemma across a meeting room table once a week for a few hours and that has been more than Skye could even have hoped for.

However, there inevitably came a point where nothing could be read over once more and everything was so perfectly final that Skye felt sick looking at the stack of papers in front of her, the stack of papers that Jemma had already signed her neat signature on with ease, the papers that Skye could not bring herself to sign.

“Skye,” Jemma says, and it’s her soft anxious voice that finally breaks Skye.

The pen falls from her fingers and clatters onto the floor, without a sound that feels almost deafening.

“Miss Poots, are you alright,” and it’s one of the lawyers talking this time and that at least snaps Skye back to reality.

For once she manages to find her word without them failing her as she says, “I’m not signing the papers.”

“Skye, don’t be difficult,” Jemma reprimands, but Skye isn’t in the mood for it.

“I’m not signing the papers,” she repeats, more definite this time, “I don’t want a divorce and  - and I’m not signing them.”

 

August 6th 2014

“Skye you’re being incredibly immature,” Jemma is yelling at her through the doorframe, because Skye had refused to answer it when she heard her knocking.

She’s not about to have those damn papers thrust in her face.

Instead she lays sprawled out on the couch listening to Jemma rant and rave at her about how she needs to grow up and take responsibility of her life.

A lesson Skye wished she had learned years before, so that she wouldn’t be in the situation she was now.

But she was, and there was no escaping it.

Her eyes focus on a stain in their carpet, a stain the stood out red against their pale brown carpets, and wonders if it’s weird to feel a metaphorical connection to a stain.

Considering how her life’s been going lately, she honestly finds it a bit more normal than she probably should.

 

August 7th 2014

When she steps out of her apartment door the next morning she finds the manila envelope returned to her, there’s a sticky note on the front of it where in an all too familiar handwriting the words ‘ _sign the damn things’_ is written.

She doesn’t sign them.

 

August 17th 2014

After spending days moving the papers about from location to location, either refusing to look at them for too long or simply needing to stare at them in some sick messed up way to remind herself that this was real.

In the end she puts them in front of what would normally be Jemma’s spot at their dining room table.

It makes it easier to remember that the papers are all she has left of her.

When Ward stops by one day with ice cream and work, he notices the papers on the table and Skye can already hear the lecture building on the tip of his tongue, which is why she jumps in before he can speak, “I know I have shitty coping methods.”

“I wasn’t going to judge.”

“The hell you weren’t,” Skye grumbles, “you know, somebody once told me not to be a snoop.”

“I take it that somebody was me?”

“Bingo,” she replies, stealing the carton of ice cream from his hand and digging her spoon into it, “now, work?”

 

August 31st 2014

“Do you trust me?”

“Not in the slightest,” she says, but she’s still typing away at the computer, following his completely crazy suggestion, “but I figure it’s worth a shot.”

“If this works you better thank me in your vows.”

“Miles, if this works I won’t have to say any vows,” Skye points out.

“Eh, technicalities.”

 

September 10th 2014

She flips the case around in her hands anxiously.

This is either the best idea or the worst idea that’s she’s ever heard of, Skye’s not exactly certain and this point, but she knows she’s going to do this.

The only other alternative is losing Jemma forever and that’s something Skye refuses to do.

 

September 11th 2014

She’s not going to ask how Ward knew where Jemma would be holding her little birthday get together. A small part of her hopes that he asked Fitz, because that would at least mean that they were talking again, but when she had tried to get the answer out of him, Ward had refused to budge an inch.

The lights outside the bar light up the night and remind her far too much of the many times she’d been there before. One time in particular sticks out, on a different person’s birthday when she foolishly ran out into the night to get away from Jemma.

Now she was going inside to do the exact opposite.

It was sort of exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.

Even the feeling of Jemma’s overstuffed jacket, the one she accidently left behind in her rush to move out, doesn’t comfort Skye nearly as much as she had hoped that it would. Though maybe her feeling of unease comes from the manila folder currently clutched against her chest, the very thing that she wishes she could forget about.

With one last deep breath, Skye pushes forward, crossing the last few feet of sidewalk and road in her way and opening the door to the bar.

It takes a minute of searching, but eventually she does find Jemma, off in the corner with a few people Skye vaguely recognized as coworker’s of Jemma’s.

They’re all laughing and enjoying themselves, though Skye notes that Jemma’s beer is only half empty in front of her, which if nothing else is a sign that she is not as in the mood for the festivities as everybody else is.

That’s enough of a motivation for Skye to push forward through the crowd until she inevitably catches Jemma’s attention, and as she looks up Skye makes certain to meet her eyes with confidence.

“What are you doing here,” Jemma says as soon as Skye is in earshot.

And for a second, Skye flounders, the words she had rehearsed with Miles almost failing her, because Jemma’s eyes are like pools that suck her in and she feels almost like she’s drowning.

It’s only when Jemma says, “Skye,” in an almost inpatient tone, that she snaps back to herself.

In a rush Skye says, “I made you a mixtape.”

“What?”

“It’s your birthday.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.”

“I made you a mixtape,” she repeats with far more confidence, “of all the songs you ruined, all the songs I can never listen to again without thinking of you and how much I love you and how scared I am that I’ve lost you forever,” Skye says, thrusting the folder into Jemma’s arms, “but I signed the papers, because that’s what you wanted, so there’s those too. It was nice - dating you, or being married to you or whatever the fuck this was.”

“Skye, I-”

“I have to go,” she cuts her off, not wanting to hear whatever Jemma’s going to say, however she’s going to let her down gently.

 

September 12th 2014

“I know that it’s around one am and you’re probably still out with your work friends, or maybe you’re in bed somewhere - I’m not sure how things are working out for you right now and I just,” Skye sighs, maybe it would just be best to hang up the phone, she had already messed everything up by crashing Jemma’s wedding dinner, the least she could do was leave the woman alone. And yet, Skye knew the one thing she couldn’t do was let her go, so she continued, “It’s not your birthday anymore, so I don’t feel bad about this. But Jemma Simmons, I love you. I’ve been in love with you for years, but I never learned out how to say it because I am terrible with words. I thought you knew that, I always figured you knew, because you’re so good at knowing thing. I just - Jemma, please don’t file those papers, because I can’t imagine my life without you.”

 

September 13th 2014

There’s a knock at her door far too early in the morning and she hopes really hopes its Ward with some form of alcohol in his hands. Though she figures she’s not that lucky, if anything it’s going to be some neighbor stopping by asking her for a cup of sugar before Skye slams the door in their face.

The thought of slamming the door in the face of one of her neighbors is pleasing enough that Skye let’s herself actually smile slightly as she opens the door, but the smile all but falls from her face when she sees who is standing there.

Honestly, it’s the last person she had ever expected to see at her doorstep and yet the only person she had ever wanted to see.

“Jemma what are you-” Skye starts to say, but she doesn’t get to finish her sentence, because Jemma crosses the distance between them to kiss her, like the kiss she had wanted the very first time they had met. There are the fireworks she had always expected, exploding before her eyes now, and she feels breathless and so happy all at once that it takes a moment for her to process everything.

When her mind finally catches up with her body she jerks away.

“No, this is,” Skye shakes her head, “I’m dreaming, aren’t I? Because there’s no way you can be here right now, there’s no way this can be happening.”

“It is,” Jemma insists and she kisses her again, but it’s softer and sweeter this time and so perfect that it almost hurts.

“How? Why? What?”

Jemma just smiles at her, with a smile that could light up the world and says the only words Skye had ever wanted to hear, “I shredded the papers.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you have all enjoyed this fic so far! Just the epilogue is left! So I wanted to take this moment to thank all of my amazing readers, who left so many wonderful comments/kudos/messaged me on tumblr and so on! You guys make this story worth writing~


	9. Epilogue

**June 3rd, 2015**

 

Without her even realizing it time seems to pass of its own accord, for once in Skye’s life she’s not looking at calendar waiting for the months to fade together and the other shoe to drop.

Instead she’s taking a deep breath and enjoying life and it’s quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to her - well, more precisely Jemma Simmons is the best thing that has ever happened to her.

And somehow that makes every moment worth living.

Though this moment would be much nicer if she didn’t feel completely and unreasonably nervous.

It seemed almost silly when Skye thought about it, to be nervous about something as simple as this, she already had Jemma it wasn’t like there was anything that she could say now that could change that.

At least, she hopes not.

Her phone goes off on the bathroom counter top and that’s her cue.

One last look in the mirror for luck.

One last check to make sure that her nervous pacing hasn’t completely ruined her hair.

One last second to smooth out the wrinkles in her dress and wonder if she should be wearing eggshell instead of white.

One last chance to run out the door, hop in her van and follow through with her lifelong dream of being a runaway bride.

She tucks the phone into the pocket on her dress without even looking at it, and grabs her camera off the counter in order to swing it’s strap around her neck, just in case she needed to document any part of the event.

When she exits out into the little hallway she feels a bit like she can do this.

Each step gets easier and before she notices it she’s almost hurrying down the hall, only stopping when a strong arm comes out to block her from moving any further forward and grabs onto her shoulders to keep her from falling over in shock.

“Please tell me you weren’t about to run out the door?”

“Did it look like that,” Skye asks cheekily.

“A little bit,” Ward says, “but I had more faith in you than somebody else did.”

She looks over his shoulder at her comment to shoot the other guy a stern look.

“Excuse me,” Fitz says sarcastically, “but it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve run out of somewhere in a huff.”

“That so?”

He makes a noise of agreement, before, “better to be safe than sorry.”

“Which reminds me, Fitz, nice tie,” Skye teases, smoothing her hand over the blue fabric with a knowing smile, “though I could have sworn Ward was wearing it an hour ago.”

At her words he looks down, cheeks coloring a vibrant red when he realizes, “shit.”

“Language,” she teases, while Fitz works at getting his tie off, Ward beside him doing the same.

She feels that it’s absolutely necessary to document this occasion and brings her camera up to snap a few pictures of them. “Really boys, the long distance thing is that bad that you can’t even wait until I’m married before you go off to find a supply closet.”

“First off you’re renewing your vows not getting married,” Fitz corrects her, “secondly, yes it’s awful.”

“You know you could move out to Florida with him,” she turns to grin at Ward, “that would finally give me and Jem the proper excuse to go down there and soak up some sun.”  

“I’ve considered it.”

“Plus then you two wouldn’t be jumping each other’s bones the second you see each other,” Skye continues, “and if you’re worried about work-”

“Don’t start.”

“I’m just saying that movie was set in Florida, and I’m sure Fitz would enjoy it-”

“I get my own private shows, thank you very much.”

“Have you ever heard of the term TMI, because this-”

“Are you guys ready,” comes another voice joining their conversation, but before Skye can turn towards down the hallway to where Jemma would surely be standing and pair of hands come up to cover her eyes.

“No looking at the bride until the ceremony begins, its bad luck,” Fitz practically singsongs, “you too Jemma, turn around.

“Oh but we’re already-”

“Turn around,” he repeats, “Grant, could you, with the tie.”

There’s noises behind her, but Skye can’t see much anything with Fitz’s hands over her eyes, they let up for a small moment, just enough for her to get a flash of light, before he slides the silk tie over her eyes. Playfully she whispers, “Kinky,” only to have her hands swatted at.

“This is absurd,” Jemma says from the other side of the room and Skye can only assume that she’s received the same treatment.

“I agree,” Skye says, “I thought one of the perks of being married was that I get to look at my beautiful wife whenever I want to.”

“Oh Skye-”

“Stop flirting, you two,” Fitz cuts her off, “no flirting till after the ceremony.”

“Do you have rules for everything?”

“Shut up,” Fitz says poking at her, while he does a pathetic job of leading her down the path.

“It’s a good thing somebody gets off to getting ordered around!”

“Shut up,” this time it’s Ward talking.

Jemma lets out a little squeak from behind her, “she’s the one that said it not me!”

“Hey, don’t be abusing my wife,” Skye objects, turning around still unable to see anything other than the tie over her eyes, but at least she gets slight enjoyment out of Fitz’s frustrated noises as he tries to get her back on the right track.

“Thank you-”

“After all, that’s my job.”

“Skye,” Jemma says slightly scandalized, “that was highly inappropriate! I don’t - we don’t- I mean, oh don’t listen to her, she’s awful and-”

“Can you three act like normal adults for one moment,” Fitz says, because he’s a hypocritical little brat, but Skye gives in with nothing more than one last grumble and lets herself be led along with whatever schemes the guys have somehow concocted.

There’s no sound for a while, other than the swishing of fabric and the click of heels against the tiled floor of the courtroom.

After what seems like forever, the tie over her eyes is finally lifted back, and maybe Fitz isn’t as crazy with his schemes as she likes to tell him, because there’s something special in that moment when the blinds are pulled away and she looks up into Jemma’s eyes on what is quite possibly the best day of her life.

Saying, “I love you,” just seems so natural and so easy that she wonders why she hadn’t been able to say it years before, why she hadn’t been able to say it from the moment she laid eyes on this wonderful woman.

But saying it a million times doesn’t even compare to when Jemma beaming at her, dressed in bridal white, replies, “I love you too.”  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR READING ALONG WITH THIS FIC AND FOR BEING SUCH AMAZING AND SUPPORTIVE READERS! Your reviews and comments have literally made my summer and have made this story so worth writing! So this is a special thanks to you all! 
> 
> As you can tell I'm really bad at these wrap up comments, but I am just so blessed and happy to have been able to share this emotional wreck of a fic with you!


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